There were a number of things that made CoH great, first and foremost the teaming - it was just fun. Sidekicking and exemplaring meant anyone (pretty much) could team with anyone else and teaming tended to benefit people due to the nature of the missions.

One of the other factors I think that impacted on the above was the limited penalty for dying. There was no equipment damage incurred by dying, just debt which lets face it, could be burnt off fairly quickly. You didn't have to exit the mission to go and repair and thus interrupt gameplay. It just halved the speed of your leveling for a bit.

Additionally, due to wakies, player rezs and, at worst, the hospitals there was no huge delay on respawning and very rarely any amount of running back from a hospital to the mission entrance. Even if you did need to run back the travel powers made it pretty quick (I'm ignoring the first incarnation of the hollows here - shudders) [a team mate with tp exiting the mission to port you was always nice as well)

I think that these two together combined to mean that, though not a happy occurance, even a team wipe wasn't a major issue, game play wasn't overly interrupted and people didn't get angsty with one another for being a n00b and ruining the mission. within minutes you'd all be rezd and ready to have at it again. This is in turn part of what i think helped make the game so friendly and encouraged teaming.

The point of this post? - CoT please don't have death overly impact on the gameplay, yes there should be a consequence but i think CoH proved it doesn't need to be particularly detrimental. I can't be doing with mmos which make me run for 10 minutes before i get back to my body and can rez. It's just not fun.

I liked CoX's debt system too, although I think there could have been more debt, frankly. At one point in another thread I mentioned that even some loss of enhancements upon death wouldn't be the end of the world. For one thing, it would make people more careful, and less likely to accept a mission that they're pretty sure they won't be able to accomplish. Although it would also lead to more people quitting out of more teams due to death.

But if there were, say, a rule that caused you to lose one random enhancement when you get defeated in PVE, you could then make any number of things that work around that, or with it. For example, you could make an enhancement that always volunteers to be the first one to get lost when you die, thus removing the randomness and giving you an advantage that way, but at the cost of making it a less optimal choice than other things you could use in that power. Or you could have player rez powers like the defender rezzes work in such a way that the rezzed target doesn't lose anything, but if they have to go to the hospital they do. Or you could have some enhancements that are REALLY good as compared to other options, but when you die they cause you to lose an EXTRA enhancement at random (not necessarily themselves).

So while it would be a big departure from what CoX had, and while I liked what CoX had, I think there's a lot of design space if you go the "lose something when you die" route too. In theory it also creates an influence sink, which could be a good thing for the economy overall.

Debt wasn't a "problem" in later years, but early on, in you were a Blaster, you "lived" in a constant state of Debt and rarely (if ever) got out of it.

I'm on record with the idea that loss of Slotted Enhancements upon Player Defeat is acceptable IF AND ONLY IF you aren't dealing with some sort of Crafted Inventions system of Enhancements. That's because it's "acceptable" to lose Common Enhancements that are "dropping" all the time and which can be bought from vendor NPCs and thus are "no big deal" to replace ... mainly because they're effectively Vendor Bait most of the time. It is NOT acceptable to have unique/rare/difficult to obtain/costly Crafted Enhancements getting destroyed by Player Defeats, simply because of the degrees and lengths of effort needed to gather the resources it takes to craft those Enhancements.

Imagine being defeated and losing a Crafted Purple Enhancement from one of your Slots as a penalty. RAGEQUIT !!!

Losing a Single Origin is "no big deal" if they're falling like rain as Drops all the time, but losing a Hamidon Origin (or Synthetic Hamidon Origin) obtained as a reward for completing a Task Force/Strike Force/Hamidon Raid is unacceptable. The key being that just like a Debt Penalty on XP, if the Enhancements are "easy come, easy go" then their loss is an acceptable Death Penalty. However, if you're dealing with a "hard to come by, easy to lose" scenario, that is NOT acceptable(!) ... because it will only create a conventional wisdom of "never use what you can't AFFORD to lose" in builds.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

I agree that nobody likes to lose stuff, and that the easily-replaced stuff is no great problem. As far as purples etc go, yes it would be a huge loss to lose one, and maybe for that reason some of them have some kind of insurance built in that prevents them from being randomly lost when you die, or maybe some sets give you that as a set bonus for having the full set (or at some lower set-completion level in other cases). Again, it only adds design space to the game to have "Enh loss on defeat in PVE" as a rule, because it gives you more good and bad qualities to attach to different enhancers, powers, missions, etc.

As far as people's behavior and the "don't slot what you can't afford to lose" problem, I agree that people would probably react that way, but then for some missions/TFs etc the getting killed isn't the problem, it's the "beat the timer" that you are worried about, in which case slotting a significantly better enhancement that carries added risk upon defeat looks like a better choice. Of course this requires you to unslot and reslot more and thus creates a needs for people to buy unslotters, etc. But that's good, because it either acts as an influence sink or causes people to want to buy unslotters in the cash shop.

I'm all for having some kind of debt penalty in CoT that's significant enough to encourage players to generally want to "avoid" dying. But by the same token I think a penalty like losing an enhancement (randomly or otherwise) is far too extreme under normal circumstances. It's all about risk versus reward - if you make the risks of doing anything too great then no one will want to team up on PUGs and/or no one will want to attempt anything even remotely dangerous. Influence sinks are fine but somehow this method to impose them simply seems too drastic to me.

I think during the design process the CoT Devs should begin with CoH's most recent death penalty implementation as a starting point. Then as the design of the game evolves they might find it possible to tweak it to better fit the details of CoT. Maybe as an alternative (or addition) to CoH's XP debt they'll figure out some other mechanic based on the way CoT specifically works like maybe certain NPC factions will react to you differently (like dynamic difficulty adjustment) if you gain a "reputation" for being routinely defeated and/or remaining undefeated. Regardless it should be balanced to be "just painful enough" without being overtly annoying.

How about instead of thinking of it as death we consider the idea of being defeated. In comics and other literature, heroes (or villains for that matter) seldom if ever actually die. They have setbacks, get defeated only to regroup and try again. Usually there is a form of recuperation that is used ( a long self induced sleep, a regeneration tank, bathing in a mystical pool for a while, maybe a magic crystal focuses healing energy on the person etc) My point is that instead of loosing anything be it influence, equipment, stats or whatever perhaps there can be something either public (like a hospital) or private (base or lair) that the characters can go to after being defeated that allows for them to recover before heading out once again into the thick of things.

or Perhaps after being defeated you operate at a diminished capacity and you can choose to either continue, digging deep into your reserves to overcome despite the thrashing you just took (maybe with bonus exp if you actually pull it off) or you retreat and seek to recover from the ordeal. There could even be stages of defeat: 1 defeat= 80% effectiveness, 2 defeats = 50%, 3 defeats = 30% ,4 defeats is KO etc. Each stage could give more exp should you actually be able to succeed but requires longer to fully recover from (maybe 5 min in recovery for 1 defeat level up to perhaps 30 min for a full on KO stage

(please note the above is my personal feelings on this and is in no way to be thought of as COT cannon)

My vote would be for CoT to handle this the same way CoX did, for all the reasons the OP already mentioned.

Any system that diminished a character's ability to fight (including loss of any items that affect powers) would make it progressively more difficult to defeat the enemy, which would actively (and cumulatively, in the event of multiple defeats) discourage the player from jumping back into the fray -- especially if the effect had a timed duration.

I don't want the game to encourage us to walk away. For me, that bouncing back into battle after a defeat was something that captured the essence of comic book combat. I'd hate to lose it.

Cinnder wrote:
I don't want the game to encourage us to walk away. For me, that bouncing back into battle after a defeat was something that captured the essence of comic book combat. I'd hate to lose it.

I'm with the OP on this one. The lack of severe death-penalty enhanced the fun of the game, and encouraged, in the words of the Extra Credits folks, "Short iteration time".

There should be some discomfort for dying, and the XP debt system did that without stopping "forward progress" of your character. The ability to get right back in and try again kept you from throwing up your hands and giving up (ragequitting).

Mendicant wrote:

Izzy wrote:
Cinnder wrote:
I don't want the game to encourage us to walk away. For me, that bouncing back into battle after a defeat was something that captured the essence of comic book combat. I'd hate to lose it.

I don't want the game to encourage us to walk away. For me, that bouncing back into battle after a defeat was something that captured the essence of comic book combat. I'd hate to lose it.

Use a Wakie ... no loss from Defeat(?)
Use a Power to Rez (either self or other) ... no loss from Defeat

Use a Hospital or a Base to Rez ... loss from Defeat

In other words, it's possible to rig a "Lose an Enhancement" system such that the penalty is imposed not at the time of being Defeated, but rather at the time of choosing where to recuperate. Only if you choose(!) to "Hospital" would there be an associated cost of "we got most of you, but not all of you, I'm afraid" that results in the loss of ONE random Enhancement.

Don't want to break your Enhancements by using Hospital services? Carry Wakies or have a "friend" who can use a Power to give you a Rez so you can stand back up (and stagger drunkenly for a few seconds).

S impleE asyE ffective

So rather than breaking an Enhancement upon defeat, instead you'd be breaking an Enhancement upon use of Hospital option ... which is easily "avoidable" with even minimal planning ahead.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

So rather than breaking an Enhancement upon defeat, instead you'd be breaking an Enhancement upon use of Hospital

That would indeed mitigate the problem somewhat. But why do we want to increase the punishment for using the hospital option? I would have thought having to trek back to the mission (in addition to the debt) was punishment enough for choosing to "Hospital."

That is my main concern with something like the risk of losing an enhancement.* The first few times it may not be a big deal (unless you don't have the money to replace the lost enhancement). For me, after those few times, it would quickly become an annoyance to not only have to trek back to the mission if, for whatever reason, I ended up at the hospital but to have to make a detour to replace a lost enhancement.

It would be a shame if any death penalty gave players second thoughts about having a go at something "just because" or "what's the worst that can happen?"

* If only non-crafted enhancements can suffer from this, then by the mid- to high levels there is every likelihood that this risk no longer exists for most players. The punishment would only affect the players / characters when they are most likely to be defeated and least able to absorb the cost.

You know, I was already thinking of the Hollows before I read these words above.

I'm just a second-tier scribbler and have little say in anything inside the game, especially mechanics-wise, but I've always thought the "your gear is now broken!" trope of dying in a game was the most irritating and insulting thing a developer could put in (beyond pay-to-win), so I'm hoping we don't go that way either.

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"What you say is rather profound, and probably erroneous." - Joseph Conrad
“The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms” - Muriel RukeyserComposition Team

It's kind of amazing how people want to have zero negative reinforcement ... of any kind, anywhere, for any reason. Even a slap on the wrist (that can be avoided!) is too much for some people. It's just astounding, really.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

* sigh *
It's kind of amazing how people want to have zero negative reinforcement ... of any kind, anywhere, for any reason. Even a slap on the wrist (that can be avoided!) is too much for some people. It's just astounding, really.

Since no one on this thread said anything of the kind, I'll assume we're now on a tangent of completely unrelated things that amaze us, and I'll contribute my own: I'm amazed when a person who is capable of expressing a detailed, logical argument can -- when his/her opinion is questioned -- resort to over-dramatic petulance instead of responding to people's reasonable questions and counter-points.

But that has nothing to do with this thread (either). I'd rather actually discuss the points people have brought up: e.g. I think Darth Fez is right - losing only non-crafted Enhs seems likely to punish characters when they can least afford it.

I think broken Enhancements could be done if broken does not mean lost. They could require repair wich would serve as money drain, without the level of frustration a complete loss would bring.

Or just use a Drained method?!?
Its not broken.. its just -1 in Potency/Effectiveness each time you DIE. ;)
And after 30 Deaths and a Mission COMPLETE, you go back to the Electric Car recharge station to FILL 'ER UP! ;)

One more point to keep in mind is that the lost, broken, or drained enhancements all fall into the category of repairing gear. Since the lack of needing to obtain/repair gear was a draw for many people, this sort of tacit reinforcement of enhancements as a standard MMO gear stand-in could be a less than ideal message.

One more point to keep in mind is that the lost, broken, or drained enhancements all fall into the category of repairing gear. Since the lack of needing to obtain/repair gear was a draw for many people, this sort of tacit reinforcement of enhancements as a standard MMO gear stand-in could be a less than ideal message.

There is the option to go with an approach that is less reminiscent of being smacked on the nose with a newspaper.

For example, each death could go toward filling up a counter or providing a clue (possibly with a limited duration). Fill up the counter and an optional mission pops up for that character. They are contacted by / can contact someone - say, Dr. Heller, to pick a completely random name - who sends them off on training, to do them a favor, or whatever. At the end of the mission the character gets buffs that last X time (imagine a more modest form of the buffs obtained upon leveling in CoH). The 'punishment' for seeking help to not constantly faceplant is the time spent on Dr. Heller's mission and, potentially, that the mission provides no rewards and/or XP.

Cinnder, I'm looking at the Whole Package of the game. I'm looking at the "economy" of what characters can "earn" (loot drops, currency, crafting materials, enhancements, inspirations, experience ... all of it) and thinking that for everything that gets made/earned, you need to have something else in the game that "drains" those things away. If you don't have what we broadly call "sinks" in the game (time sink, cash sink, item sink, etc.) then you wind up with a runaway inflationary game economy. People are continually getting stuff, but they aren't consuming or using it at anywhere NEAR the rate at that stuff is generated. Quantity skyrockets and Demand is either stagnant or marginal (often both) and all you have left is Vendor Bait.

What I'm complaining about is that even the notion that there can be *small* sinks for enhancements, currency, time, etc. after a player is Defeated are intolerable to some people ... and the reason why isn't that hard to figure out. It's the What's Mine Is MINE! entitlement of possession, with a healthy flavoring of "don't break my toys!" thrown in for good measure. But we've already seen where that leads, if you've played City of Heroes. Single Origin Enhancements were functionally "worthless" and the only thing that mattered was Inventions, since Inventions would "never break" like Single Origins (et al.) would. But Single Origins kept dropping all the time ... and so you wound up with a glut of supply that was actually only useful as Vendor Bait.

But here's the crux of the difference between us.

As is quite obvious from the way people approach this particular topic ... of a Limited Death Penalty ... there's essentially two schools of thought. Both of these schools begin and end with an assumption of Equilibrium, in which a particular character build can exist and persist in a relatively unchanging way. The difference though is that there's two basic "flavors" of Equilibrium that can be fashioned by how the game mechanics work ... a Static Equilibrium or a Dynamic Equilibrium.

A Static Equilibrium is set up such that once a character has acquired their "final" gear spec (in this case, Enhancements) ... that's it. Nothing ever happens to it ever again (barring a respec). The character build is "static" and unchanging. Nothing is ever "lost" and nothing ever need be added to it ever again. It's FIXED. Eternal. Unchanging. It requires no "effort" on the part of the player to maintain. You "earned" it, and now it's "your build" ... for all eternity, no matter what.

A Dynamic Equilibrium, by contrast, is something you can "have" and something you can "maintain" ... but is also something of a saddle point. It's something that you can "get to" and stay on top of, but if you do "nothing" then you'll begin to fall off. In other words, there's a little bit of "work" involved on the player's part to stay within the bounds of the Dynamic Equilibrium. That amount of "effort" could be something as simple as just replacing something that breaks with something that drops quite often. The key point being, how much "effort" is too much for a Dynamic Equilibrium to remain a "fun" experience. What I'm hearing from a lot of people is that ANY effort needed to maintain a Dynamic Equilibrium is too much effort, as far as they're concerned.

Durability repairs and the like exist in games for a reason. They act as sinks for the resources that players generate simply by playing the game.

What happens to a game that doesn't have any sinks of any kind for the resources that are generated by players?
Short answer: a broken game economy.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

We have talked about what defeat looks like for the game. While I can't release details, I can say that we will not be imposing detrimental effects on a defeated character or reducing effectiveness of powers (like breaking, reducing, of slotted improvements).

Redlynne wrote:
So rather than breaking an Enhancement upon defeat, instead you'd be breaking an Enhancement upon use of Hospital

That would indeed mitigate the problem somewhat. But why do we want to increase the punishment for using the hospital option? I would have thought having to trek back to the mission (in addition to the debt) was punishment enough for choosing to "Hospital."

Considering that travel powers are going to be around, I honestly don't think that the travel time is really going to be a problem, especially if those powers allow you to skip most of the mobs on the way there/back.

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Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

We have talked about what defeat looks like for the game. While I can't release details, I can say that we will not be imposing detrimental effects on a defeated character or reducing effectiveness of powers (like breaking, reducing, of slotted improvements).

That's good to hear; using a simple/casual defeat system as the baseline leaves the door open to solutions that will keep all players interested.

I think it's relatively easy for anyone who desires a more hardcore defeat penalty to impose it on themselves, especially if the players are given the tools for it (similar to what CoH had). Any player who wants to experience hardcore defeats can simply deactivate XP for as long as they feel is appropriate after defeat, delete as many enhancements as they wish, adjust their difficulty settings to simulate having their powers temporarily weakened, log out to roleplay a long physical recovery...or even delete their character.

There can even be groups of hardcore players (teams, chat channels, supergroups) who impose such rules on their team members as a constant challenge, or conduct special challenge events. All optional, of course, under the players' control, and -never- imposed by one group of hardcore players on another group of unwilling casual players.

The mechanical death penalty HAS to be the same no matter how you rez. Otherwise we end up with people lying KO'd in the street, spamming broadcast to be rezzed rather than rezzing to hospital and getting back in the game.

I mean, there's a downside to rezzing to hospital anyway: Lost time. You are removed from the area you lost in, and have to travel back to get even. If you get an in-mission rez, you're back in the game much faster. And that's really the main point here. Getting back into the game. You die, you rez, you get back. The faster you get back, the better.

If the death penaly is lenient, it also encourages more casual teaming up and taking silly risks. And CoH was fun partly because you COULD take a silly risk now and again and not be harshly penalized for doing so. You know, like having a Defender or Blaster tank an AV or something. Only possible in extreme edge cases, but sometimes worth a shot. With a harsh penalty, no one would take that shot and just give up. And that's just not the heroic thing (or villanous thing) to do. Never give up. glory or death!

One thing that's very notable in City of Heroes is that it had casual raids. Like, full on endgame raids made entirely of pick-up teams. And why not? There was no death penalty at level 50 anyway, so people went for it. Found out it was doable, and then the Incarnate Trial community, with no need to be in any raid guild, was formed. That's pretty unique for an MMO.

Thanks, Red; that's a reply I can respond to. You're absolutely right that an MMO like this needs sinks to keep the economy valuable. I agree that defeat should have *some* associated consequence. What I'm not quite sure about is how you got to "the notion that there can be *small* sinks for enhancements, currency, time, etc. after a player is Defeated are intolerable to some people" on a thread called "Limited Penalty for Death" -- it seems to me we're all in agreement on this, not at odds. (And others in this thread have listed benefits to a limited defeat penalty.) I'm also unsure of why going to the hospital should have more of a penalty than rezzing in some other fashion. I think McNum has presented a good counter-argument to that, but I'd still like to hear anyone's reasons in favour of an increased penalty for "Hospitalling."

Though losing Enhs on defeat is a moot point based on what Tannim has said (thanks, Tannim!), I hear what you're saying about a dynamic equilibrium. Even what we had in CoX with expiring Enhs was a form of that, so your point about balance between "effort" and "fun" is the key there. I can't speak for anyone else, but the problem I have with losing an Enh or degrading equipment the way it's done in most other MMOs is not a sense of entitlement, but the feeling that I'm having to do chores in-game -- which must mean that, for me, stuff like that is weighted too far to the "effort" side, cuz I don't find it "fun" in the least. I guess we'll have to rely on MWM to come up with the right balance for the wider playerbase. And they can always adjust over time.

Gangrel: I wouldn't say travel time is a problem, but an inconvenience. Even with travel powers in CoX, getting back to some mish doors could still be a slog at times. There's far too much we don't know about CoT yet to know what this will be like. How far could a mish door be from the closest hospital? How limited will the starter travel powers be? etc. Are you suggesting that going to the Hospital should have more of a penalty? If so, maybe you can answer my question as to why that is desirable.

I had no problem with XP debt. I found it to be a very mild incentive to play intelligently without being too tough if your preferred tactic was the Scream and Leap Technique™.

But, I came from SWG where, for many years, death not only meant "wounds" which were a drop in your total hit points each time you were defeated and they didn't heal back unless you were treated by a doctor or combat medic or logged out in a hospital for a sufficient time. I remember seeing folks come into the hospital after a particularly tough fight with only 5 hit points! Also, there was item decay. Not just equipped items, but everything in your inventory at the time! These things meant there was good incentive for healers and crafters in the game but it was a pain for combat players.

Well, the only actual penalty you can have on death is lost time. The only question is when the lost time is going to be.

Immediate lost time is how long it takes for you to get back to whatever it was you were doing. People generally don't mind this as long as it's not too long. This also includes time you have to idel to get back to fulll strength. But if you add idle time, then you've probably already hit "too long".

Delayed lost time is when you do something to the character that will take up time to fix. Steal stuff from their inventory, put a status penalty on them that they have to wait out. These just frustrate players and should in most cases be avoided if your goal is an action-heavy many vs. few style MMO like CoH was.

Experience Debt was delayed lost time, mind you, it would take longer to reach the next level as long as you had debt. But it didn't hurt your character, in some cases it even helped as you got more inf before needing to replace your old SOs so they didn't go red on you. Of course, when IOs happened, this became a moot point since you could just use level 25+ IOs all the way to 50.

But time is the only penalty that both player and character shares, and it's what all death penalties really boil down to in the end. Lost time.

We have talked about what defeat looks like for the game. While I can't release details, I can say that we will not be imposing detrimental effects on a defeated character or reducing effectiveness of powers (like breaking, reducing, of slotted improvements).

Isn't everything bad that could possibly happen to a character a "detrimental effect", including simply being knocked off your feet onto the ground, unconsciousness, requiring a rez, being TPed safely to a remote (Hospital) and having to shlep your way back to the mission, etc? I don't see why you'd want there to be literally no detrimental effects for getting defeated, for if that's really true, then why avoid getting defeated at all?

As it was in CoH toward the end of the game, getting defeated was such a non-issue, even with XP debt, that most people would gladly volunteer to die just so they could use Rise of the Phoenix, or so that someone could cast Vengeance off of them, etc.

If by "no detrimental effects" you just mean no loss of combat effectiveness or gear, I believe this still leaves open the possibility of going into "Influence Debt", which hasn't been discussed much, but could be a thing. For one thing, level-capped characters would have no reason to avoid defeat whatsoever if there wasn't something like that, at least for them (also, this is what CoH had, IIRC, right?).

As for the rest, I agree with Red that sinks are a good thing for the game economy. I think they add replayability to the game by giving people a need to replay stuff just to get replacement gear. Frankly, as I said, before, I'm fine with the classic CoH defeat rules, but I don't think a slightly harsher system is entirely without it's upside. As I said, adding more replayability, and more design space in the powers/enhancements/missions is a good thing, I feel.

We treat defeat itself as a status not a detrimental effect. I was referencing suggestions along the lines of penalties to "stats" on defeat, or reduction of "gear effectiveness". When it comes to defeat, the majority of games rely on the common technique of the time sink. Even gear degradation has much less of an impact (this does vary from game to game) on the economy of an MMO "world" than it feeds into the concept of a time sink. The real penalty is time, another reason to keep the player playing.

While our "enhancement" system is the "gear" of our game, it may not necessarily be "gear" that can suffer damage in every concept of the application. We view the base of our "enhancement" system as an Improvement to powers. Having powers degrade in effectiveness upon defeat via damaging the Improvements applied to them falls in the same lines (in our view) as applying some form of debuff to "stats". Being defeated and weakened due to the defeat could lead to frustration where it becomes a "pay up" or " wait out" before you can try again, or try again where chances are if defeat occurred previously, it may happen again because you're under penalty. This could lead to the eventuality of forcing the pay up or wait out scenarios.

It is not to say these types of defeat penalties are wrong, they may not be right for the game we intend to make. What we aim for is a game that is both familiar to fans of CoH and yet new. The death penalty we hope to implement will work within this guideline, familiar yet new, that keeps people playing. We have some ideas that can add a twist or two, but we will revisit those later.

Yesterday I was going a Veteran Dungeon in Wildstar with my guild.. we wiped 20 or so times in the whole run, and our gear was *just* getting to the dangerous level of having to be repaired before it became useless.

This was over the course of a few hours[1].

After each death, we had *no* performance decreasing effects on us. we just had at the end of the day the repair bill. And sure, it might have stung a little bit... but I made that money back fairly fast (as in around an hours worth of playing normally recouped the costs).

So it really wasn't a problem for me or the rest of the guild. But this is to go and say that it is a balancing act between being "punishing" in terms of financial cost and a negligible cost. I feel that Carbine got the balance just right. Hell due to the levelling curve, you can pretty much ignore repairing your gear as you level up your character because it gets replaced relatively often.

[1] No, we didn't complete it, but we got close a few times. Although we have done the dungeon in normal mode, this is like the game turned up to 11... where you cannot just mash your abilities mindlessly... you have to become proficient. And whilst some encounters you can cope with the death of 1 player.. losing more than 1 player raises the bar quite a bit. We actually defeated one of the bosses with just a healer and DPS (me) alive for 30% of the last fight. Nice adrenaline rush at the very end. The same happened in a PUG run last week with me... the last boss stumped that group.

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Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

That sounds good for games like wow wildstar and few others but I always hated repairing gear personally just seemed like an extra little annoying thing that bothered me and for superheroes most would be wearing tights so the repair bill would be cheap to fix I liked city of heroes debt system You died accrued a little debt and just jump back into battle but we will just have to wait to see what titans has in store for us

XP Debt works fine as a "disincentive" for characters who haven't yet reached the Level Cap. Once you get to the Level Cap though, it effectively becomes meaningless. Indeed, the only thing that XP Debt functionally did at the Level Cap was cut your INF gain in half until you'd paid off your Debt. That's because XP is an obsolete resource to characters who are sitting at the Level Cap but who are still getting played.

In other words, Debt was something that only punished the "young" but not the "old" (in a manner of speaking) ... and even then, use of the word "punish" is easily debatable (but you get what I mean).

Star Trek Online has a Death Penalty system in which defeats don't necessarily have to provoke repair costs. In Normal play, there's no "cost" associated with a defeat other than having to wait to respawn inside the mission. That's it ... pure time sink. Indeed, it's a pure buzz killing time sink. First time you get defeated, you wait 15 seconds. Next time you wait 30 seconds before you can respawn. Third time you have to wait 45 seconds ... and so on. It's literally "go sit in the corner and face the wall" style Time Out™ on your gameplay for having gotten yourself killed, with progressively larger time sinks to more often you kill yourself (presumably with stupid gameplay) while everyone else continues to have fun (in a multiplayer setting). Trust me, the buzz kill from Not Being Able To Play while you wait out the timer can be a pretty powerful DISincentive to play the game recklessly!

Stacked on top of this Normal Difficulty of gameplay is Hard Mode and Elite Mode. In Hard Mode, you're confronted with additional opposition, just as if you had extra Players in your group, and in Elite Mode it ups the difficulty even more with even more plentiful opposition. In both of these modes, the Death Penalty increases by adding permanent debuffs to your character/ship which either require expenditure of an item from your inventory to clear (which can be done inside the mission itself) or at a starbase/shipyard facility (think capital city if it helps). Clearing the permanent debuffs is "free" (costing 0 Energy Credits) so no one will go broke or wind up in a kind of "coffin corner" of the game where they're too wounded/broken to do content and can't earn enough cash to get themselves fixed up back to unbroken status.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

I'm with the OP on this one. The lack of severe death-penalty enhanced the fun of the game, and encouraged, in the words of the Extra Credits folks, "Short iteration time".
There should be some discomfort for dying, and the XP debt system did that without stopping "forward progress" of your character. The ability to get right back in and try again kept you from throwing up your hands and giving up (ragequitting).
Mendicant wrote:
Izzy wrote:
Cinnder wrote:
I don't want the game to encourage us to walk away. For me, that bouncing back into battle after a defeat was something that captured the essence of comic book combat. I'd hate to lose it.

Seriously ... Recall Friend + Vengeance + Fallout + Mutation and "crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women."

+11 to infinity
More seriously death was always more of a penalty for me because I didn't want to die ... not something the designers really have any control over beyond making it a punishment strong enough that it starts to interfere with my fun and that is not a good thing.

nobody likes to fail. that and the time cost of returning along with xp debt was enough of a penalty.

I hated travelling from one side of the zone to the other for a mission... it felt like the game was punishing me, and I am not even referring to Independence Port here.

./sarcasm

—

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

For one thing, it would make people more careful, and less likely to accept a mission that they're pretty sure they won't be able to accomplish.

Making players more careful does not fit well with the superhero genre. Superheroes typically don't do a careful risk assessment before accepting a mission. They see a wrong and then try to right it, odds be damned.

Some of my fondest memories in CoH are getting into something over my head, failing several times, and then recruiting backup from supergroup or even asking in general chat. It was fun because 1) I could fail without significant penalty, and 2) others could help me without much risk to themselves.

The most valid argument I've heard in favor of tangible loss for defeat (enh loss/reduction/etc.) is the need for resource sinks. I agree completely that the CoX economy was hopelessly broken because of a lack of resource sinks, especially at end-game.

I do, however, think that defeat and resource sinks should absolutely not be tied together. Xp debt, or something similar, is perfect IMHO as a penalty. Resource sinks need to be unrelated to defeat but do need to be inevitable/unavoidable in order to keep the economy strong.

Supply and Demand are facts of reality, even in nature. As long as the supply of resources is unlimited, there will always be a broken economy, even with moderate/voluntary sinks. If the economy included a specified amount of resources (money, improvements, crafting supplies, etc.) per added character and those were removed if the character were deleted, then the economy could remain strong. This, however, is not feasible as far as I can figure. Therefore the only way to limit the supply of resources is to make their close-ended use as rapid as their gain. By "close-ended" I'm referring to spending such resources on crafting other items, selling/giving them to NPCs and any such use which permanently removes them from the economy as opposed to transferring them to another pc which keeps them in the economy. This could be incentivized by making consumables worth heftier prices, by allowing contacts to accept bribes, by making all improvements have an effective duration so they'd have to eventually be replaced, or some other means I'm sure the devs could devise.

The short of it is that there is no need to penalize defeat in any way which curtails the power of the defeated; slowing progress via xp debt is enough and promotes interaction with other players through pugs and such (as detailed earlier in this thread) which in turn leads to a stronger and more close-knit community.

If the economy is subject to problems, one would expect that its level 50 toons with a lot of disposable wealth to throw around that are a big part of the cause of that. Them and the people who try to manipulate the auction house system, which is also a lot easier to do if you have a level capped toon on your account and a lot of legitimately accumulated wealth for that reason. I don't think anyone is blaming the newby level 10 toons that just got made by brand new incoming players for the state of the economy. XP debt affects the lowby lvl 10 but does nothing to an already level capped toon, so you're really NOT treating all defeats equally in that system and you're right back to "economy problems" again anyway. You're choosing not to punish the level-capped for getting defeated, while punishing the non-level-capped. Simply throwing up your hands and saying "Oh well, there's always going to be economy problems, there's nothing we can do." is not a compelling argument for choosing to punish some people but not others upon defeat and getting a buggy economy out of it for your trouble.

I assume you're not talking to me because I was saying that there doesn't have to be market distortion; I was saying that market distortion will happen regardless of any connection between defeat and resource diminishment so long as there are not other forms of resource sinks. I also specifically mentioned end-game pcs as the major causes of such distortion ("...a lack of resource sinks, especially at end-game.").

That being said, I agree with your point that there is a dramatic discrepancy between the positive disincentive administered to non-capped toons vs. capped toons. That is something that most certainly should be addressed. Applying a negative disincentive, however, is something I would think should be avoided. Perhaps the application, to capped toons, of a monetary debt which would be paid off in the same way that xp debt is for non-capped toons. The income and drops for capped toons would be halved (or more) for a certain length of time or a certain amount of income/drops in this scenario. This would have, I expect, the benefit of not promoting team snobbery while also curtailing the speed at which new resources enter the economy.

The assumption seems to be that any market distortion that has existed in other games must necessarily be corrected via negative disincentive for defeat. I feel that this assumption is both incorrect and undesirable in a game based on comic book superheroes. That is especially true of one that is being created due to a powerful community bound together by the love of a feeling not found in other games, to wit, that community itself.

As far as I'm concerned, on this topic I think that Star Trek Online does a really good job, as I've mentioned before. The "death penalty" is a TIME OUT from playing the game. It starts at being a 15 second countdown before you can respawn back into the zone. Die too quickly and that countdown timer to respawn starts stacking up ... 30 seconds, 45 seconds, 60 seconds. I think I've seen it go as high as 90 seconds once after getting repeatedly curbstomped.

Then there's the additional option of playing on harder difficulty modes. ONLY when you play on harder difficulty than normal do you suffer a persistent Debuff that remains with you until you "repair" it ... either with an item (taken from inventory) or by visiting an NPC in a civilized location (who fixes you up for free). That's it. Expend an item specifically meant to expire the Debuff you've been given, or head back to "town" and get yourself patched up. It's really that simple.

In Star Trek Online there is no XP Debt. But getting defeated is still a major buzzkill. After you've been defeated, you can't rez yourself until the timer finishes its countdown (there are no Wakies you can use). Note that another player can still come over and rez you before the countdown expires, and get you back into the game faster than the countdown timer. The lockout of the timer is merely on YOU rezzing yourself, not on other players rezzing you where you fell.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

While I can personally relate to what you're saying about blasters, having given up on them many times due to their level of squishiness, I believe that point is misapplied in this situation. We're not suggesting that disincentives for dying should be "equally distributed" across all classes. We're saying that they should be applied to each defeat in a way that it does act as disincentive without detracting from the excitement of the moment and therefore the immersive feel of the game and the willingness to pug and try crazy heroic acts. While running back from a hospital is time consuming, it is still you controlling your character and rushing to get back in the fight. A rez timer as you're suggesting forces you to just lay there. In the case of TPKs it gets even worse. Speaking from experience I can say that having an entire team hosping and dashing back to the mission site in order to trounce the curs that just trounced you is a great teambuilding exercise.

As to the blaster issue, that's about the blaster's defensive capabilities, not the application of disincentives. In CoT there will be tertiary sets from which the more fragile classes can take powers designed to shore up their defenses. Applying a time out would still affect blasters more than other classes in the absence of such defenses. Changing the disincentive will not change the equitability of application, it will only change how it's perceived by teammates. The reason blasters were invited to teams was for DPS. How much DPS is the blaster adding while lying on the ground waiting for a clock to run out as opposed to popping a wakie? By enforcing a rez timer they'd not put all classes on equal footing, they'd make the more fragile classes even less likely to be invited to teams. Teammate rezzes have long timers, usually longer than 90 seconds due to the power they hold. Better to just substitute a scrapper in place of the fragile blaster.

No, I feel that the better solution to the blaster defeats is exactly what the devs already thought of: tertiary power sets which can be used to shore up weak spots in every primary/secondary build. The issue of defeat disincentive must be addressed separately from the issue of class vulnerability.

As far as I'm concerned, on this topic I think that Star Trek Online does a really good job, as I've mentioned before. The "death penalty" is a TIME OUT from playing the game. It starts at being a 15 second countdown before you can respawn back into the zone. Die too quickly and that countdown timer to respawn starts stacking up ... 30 seconds, 45 seconds, 60 seconds. I think I've seen it go as high as 90 seconds once after getting repeatedly curbstomped.
...
In Star Trek Online there is no XP Debt. But getting defeated is still a major buzzkill. After you've been defeated, you can't rez yourself until the timer finishes its countdown (there are no Wakies you can use). Note that another player can still come over and rez you before the countdown expires, and get you back into the game faster than the countdown timer. The lockout of the timer is merely on YOU rezzing yourself, not on other players rezzing you where you fell.

Some of this comes down to personal preference, of course -- SWTOR had similar defeat mechanic and I *hated* that (would definitely not like to play a CoT that used this method) -- but doesn't this sort of mechanic go directly against one of the main goals several of us have been advocating for: that we want a superhero game to encourage you to jump back into the fray when defeated? Seems to me "time outs" and lack of Wakies act in direct opposition to that goal. Not that it would necessarily be appropriate for CoT, but as an example FFXIV actually goes to the opposite extreme and gives a small bonus if one is defeated in some instanced battles to encourage one to try again.

Maybe I could understand some of these alternate death penalty suggestions if we stepped back one level and answered the question: what is the purpose in having a penalty for being defeated? Why does there have to be any penalty at all for defeat other than the personal embarrassment? Given that Tannim has said there won't be gear degradation, it's not an economy issue, so what is the goal? Note that I'm not necessarily advocating an absence of penalty; I'm just asking why there needs to be one. If we can define the purpose of such a penalty, we can better assess how the options help us reach that goal.

Why does there have to be any penalty at all for defeat other than the personal embarrassment?

For a lot of people, there either is no personal embarrassment or they're incapable of being embarrassed about getting defeated ... especially if they get to cackle madly about HOW they got themselves (and others?) defeated.

Cinnder wrote:

what is the purpose in having a penalty for being defeated?

Because if there's no penalty ... NONE ... then there's no motivation to avoid defeat. Being defeated, deliberately (and repeatedly), can turn into a strategy ... an exploit. Or to put it another way ...

If there is no PAIN there is no incentive to LEARN ... or get better.

I mean, think about it. If there's never, ever, anywhere, ever, any kind of negative reinforcement to tell you "you shouldn't be doing that" then you'll just keep on doing it.

Seriously. If defeat is something you don't have to avoid, and there's no penalty for it ... what is the game REALLY telling you? What are you supposed to LEARN from being defeated?

I lot of people in real life say they want to live their lives without pain. But pain is *necessary*. It is a survival mechanism. It's there to tell you when you're doing it wrong. Pain is something to be avoided, not eliminated. If it didn't "hurt" to stick your fingers in your eyes, and go blind because you did that, almost every kid in the world would blind themselves before they got to be teenagers.

A penalty for defeat is necessary to prevent behavioral norms from taking root that should not be supported, aided or abetted by the inherent structure of a game.

Now, we can argue about how "strong" or punitive such a penalty ought to be ... but the PURPOSE of such a penalty should never be in doubt. Because we ALL know that both in online games and in real life ... if there's no "penalty" for being stupid then people will be STUPID to the maximum of their ability. Do we really want to foster and encourage such stupidity?

My answer to the question is NO.

So I think a defeat penalty is appropriate in every game ... even if it's just a 15 second "buzzkill" time out while everyone else gets to keep having fun while you're not, and that's it.

—

Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

Just a couple of points I would like to make on the issue...take them as you will...

I always found the limited death penalty in CoH to be a contributing factor to the friendly community in the game. I personally found that I would be open to teams with strangers because I knew that they were unable to ruin my fun due to their inexperience or troll behavior (not saying everyone just it was a factor in my decision to team or not). What I am saying is I am perfectly able to accept when I get defeated as a result of my own actions....but when someone else is the cause it aggravates me.

I am not fond of a system that compounds that aggravation with a high cost to defeat such as time outs or gear destruction. In games with gear destruction I tend to avoid teaming with people I do not know because of this. Just a thought.

The other thing I am curious about is what people think about a direct influence cost upon defeat. Games like Borderlands have a built in respawn that is close enough to CoHs to be comparable. In that game (for those who don't know) when you are defeated you are respawned the last respawn point you passed and you are charged a percentage of your money that covers the cost of you being resurrected.

If this is used in CoT it can operate in a similar fashion. For one thing it can fit in the lore of the game fairly well....as we all know influence (or infamy) was the currency in the game but what it represented is effectively how the world saw your character...your reputation of a sort. If you are defeated then losing some of this influence or infamy would logically fit assuming of course that CoT had the same currency concept. The other aspect of this is it acts as a direct currency sink in the game much as the destruction of items would...it just cuts out the middle man. Even another aspect of this would be a no loss to a characters combat effectiveness in relation to the current challenge.

I would like to make what I am saying clear so no one is confused. The influence lost would be a percentage of the characters total influence and it should have a cap so as to not unfairly punish max level characters who are amassing wealth. The use of a percentage means that it will never be an all or nothing affair and as such be relevant through all levels.

As I've argued in the past, and this is strictly academic "devil's advocate" stuff, having a penalty for getting defeated, such as "get defeated, lose a random enhancement in one of your powers" opens up design space in the sense that you can then make all sorts of stuff that prevents, manipulates, ameliorates, exacerbates, enhances, reduces, or otherwise effects that in some way. So you could have some powers that, say, defenders get, that rez a target but prevent them from losing the usual random IO. You could have some IOs that are inherently less likely to be picked for deletion upon defeat, or are completely safe from it. You could have other IOs that are MORE likely to be the unlucky victim of a "defeat-delete" event, but are better IOs while you still have them. You could make "safe from deletion" a set bonus. Etc etc. The point is (and I've said this before too), starting from the standpoint of a game that has inherently restrictive or somewhat harsh base rules gives you (the designer) the ability to make powers/enhancers/set bonuses, etc that trump that or are effected by it in some interesting way(s). This makes the game of slotting IOs into your build that much more richly diversified and complex.

All that said, I'm fine with doing it more or less the way CoX did, if that's what they're leaning toward. I just think the more punishing defeat penalty idea has some interesting possibilities, and I'd be fine with that too.

The only thing I would change is that cap. If capped toons are amassing such wealth then it stands to reason that such wealth should be taken out of the economy at the same rate as for lower toons. Giving capped toons a limited version would return us to the problem of unfairly penalizing those who need more money over those who really don't. In fact, I think the percentage possibly should increase commensurate to level, although I haven't had a chance to really think through the ramifications of such a policy.

The only thing I would change is that cap. If capped toons are amassing such wealth then it stands to reason that such wealth should be taken out of the economy at the same rate as for lower toons..

The reason I suggest a cap is because a character will spend a much greater time at max level. If that character is actively played they have the possibility to continue to gain wealth. Without the cap the influence lost can take a much greater amount of time to recover than would be considered fair.

A simple math example using made up numbers just to show what I mean...

If the defeat penalty is 10% of total influence.
If the time to earn 100 influence at max level is 1 hour and the time to earn 100 influence at mid range is 2 hours.
If the max level character has been max level for a significant time (as we all know a characters career will on average spend a vast majority of its time t max level) and earned 1 000 000 influence
If the mid range character has only earned 10 000 influence.

The time it takes the max level character to recover his losses is 1000 hours while the mid range character will only take 20 hours to earn it back.

As you can see this is the inevitable issue with a no cap system. The max level character suffers a Non-proportional death penalty due to the fact he is older. The only way a non cap system will work is if the average earning of a max level character is astronomically greater than that of a mid range character which would be a far greater issue for the overall game.

And as the levelcapped character continues to amass wealth, eventually he will approach the point where the time it takes to recover the lost wealth will be less than the time he can expect to adventure without being defeated at least once, making what is effectively a soft cap on wealth. Unless he becomes very risk-averse to avoid defeat, which goes into islandtrevor72's first point: the ease of finding people willing to group with you.

Its just easier to use a % value and leave it at that.
It shouldn't matter if my Level 50 as $1B and my other has $100K. If I pay a 10% fee for dying then my characters will pay:
CharA with $1,000,000,000 (using American English 1B and not English 1B) pays $100,000,000
CharB with $100,000 pays $10,000.

How long does it take to get back $10,000? Maybe 1 fight or maybe 1 hr.
How long does it take to get back $100,000,000? Probably a hell of a lot longer but that's what happens when you hoard your money Uncle Scrooge :)

This can easily be tied into however Rezzing works. In CoH it was technology stolen from the Rikti (if memory serves me correctly) but this has to be maintained by someone and the higher payments for the high level characters will help offset the lower payments by the low level characters.

Cinnder wrote:
what is the purpose in having a penalty for being defeated?
Because if there's no penalty ... NONE ... then there's no motivation to avoid defeat. Being defeated, deliberately (and repeatedly), can turn into a strategy ... an exploit. Or to put it another way ...
If there is no PAIN there is no incentive to LEARN ... or get better.
I mean, think about it. If there's never, ever, anywhere, ever, any kind of negative reinforcement to tell you "you shouldn't be doing that" then you'll just keep on doing it.
Seriously. If defeat is something you don't have to avoid, and there's no penalty for it ... what is the game REALLY telling you? What are you supposed to LEARN from being defeated?
I lot of people in real life say they want to live their lives without pain. But pain is *necessary*. It is a survival mechanism. It's there to tell you when you're doing it wrong. Pain is something to be avoided, not eliminated. If it didn't "hurt" to stick your fingers in your eyes, and go blind because you did that, almost every kid in the world would blind themselves before they got to be teenagers.
A penalty for defeat is necessary to prevent behavioral norms from taking root that should not be supported, aided or abetted by the inherent structure of a game.
Now, we can argue about how "strong" or punitive such a penalty ought to be ... but the PURPOSE of such a penalty should never be in doubt. Because we ALL know that both in online games and in real life ... if there's no "penalty" for being stupid then people will be STUPID to the maximum of their ability. Do we really want to foster and encourage such stupidity?
My answer to the question is NO.
So I think a defeat penalty is appropriate in every game ... even if it's just a 15 second "buzzkill" time out while everyone else gets to keep having fun while you're not, and that's it.

Hmmm...interesting line of thought. But now I have to step up one more meta-level and ask, why is being defeated in a virtual world a bad thing that we want to discourage? How is it stupid? The suggestion that we should learn not to be defeated implies there is a correct and incorrect way to play, and I'm not sure I'd support that notion if it doesn't unduly affect others. I personally don't like to be defeated in a game, but if someone else wants to run into a group and die -- just by themselves without causing an unwanted teamwipe or other griefing -- who are we to tell them that's wrong? I'd be much more concerned with players who walk away from a game due to frustration with harsh defeat penalties than players who are defeated, pop a Wakie, and jump back in to continue fighting. I'm thinking the primary goal should be to keep players playing, not to prevent them from doing so.

Defeat as a strategy: what's wrong with that? I'm now thinking of my blaster's beloved Rise of the Phoenix, which (like other death-based powers) seemed to actually encourage defeat. That implies to me that the devs didn't think there was anything too terrible about defeat, even as a strategy. RotP almost felt like a consolation prize to me, as opposed to a penalty.

Defeat as an exploit: can you give examples?

The real world example of pain when ones sticks fingers in one's eyes is there because blindness would cause a host of difficulties for survival of an organism. In a virtual world, being defeated doesn't keep a player from continuing to play the game or handicap them in some way other than via the types of penalties we're discussing -- but then that's making the warning pain into the very thing the warning is supposed to dissuade. I'm not currently seeing any other bad effect of being defeated -- but remain open to examples.

One of my early toons (Tylwyth Teg) was an Empathy/electricity defender (yeah, I know, most useless combo there is). Almost never using electricity allowed him to focus on healing and buffing. He ran primarily with melee peeps who just loved him because of his main way to rez: He would run smack into the middle of the fight (rez had a short range) and get the rez off before face-planting. In that way he'd sacrifice himself to save the other. A Noble Sacrifice. A Heroic Act. Any way you see it, it was a very valid self sacrifice.

I also played a blaster named Enoch back then. He had Phase from the stealth pool and would use it to grab agro to pull mobs of mobs back to the team. Most of the time he could do it without getting gakked. Sometimes, however, the team couldn't take enough of the agro off him before the phase dropped so he would face plant. Taking one for the team. Obviously this was only helpful around corners and such and he did eventually figure out the beauty of Enemy TP but still, perfectly valid strategy.

XP debt didn't matter. A Time Out would have made it impossible for either of those toons to remain a useful member of team because they couldn't fulfill their purpose for being there.

Monetary loss would have been acceptable as well. Gear loss would have also limited their usefulness to the team.

No, anything that dissuades a team from inviting either a fragile class or someone who uses defeat as a valid strategy is going to make teaming less desirable and thereby hurt the social/community aspect of the game in general. It not only penalizes the character but also all the players in the game. Penalties for using defeat recklessly or as greifing are already baked in by the Kick and Quit buttons.

Hmmm...interesting line of thought. But now I have to step up one more meta-level and ask, why is being defeated in a virtual world a bad thing that we want to discourage? How is it stupid?

Cinnder, I've already given my answer to this question. Simply asking "why" to every answer, the way a child might, doesn't get you any closer to a solution. All it does is prevent acceptance of the answer you've already been given so as to demand another answer, until you get one you'll like. Recursive "but why?" demands are not inherently reasonable.

As for "how is it stupid?" ... do I really need to answer that? Suicidal Man is hardly my idea (or I'd think anyone else's) of a Heroic, or Villainous, figure or concept. Again, if there is no "cost" associated with being Defeated then there are people who will see nothing wrong with getting Defeated as often as possible. L2P n00b!

Do you REALLY want "I'm gonna go in there and get killed!" to be an accepted (let alone expected!) behavioral norm in a game? Even if you do have "infinite lives" to expend, do you really want people to get comfortable with trying ... deliberately ... to use them all up as fast as they can, just because they can at no cost?

Or even more to the point ... do you want people to LEARN NOTHING from being Defeated?

Being Defeated in a game is pretty much the definition of "you're doing it wrong!" and if there's no penalty for it then there's no reason not to keep doing it wrong. And keep doing it wrong. And keep on doing it wrong. There is literally no penalty for failure, so there is nothing to learn from having failed.

Cinnder wrote:

The suggestion that we should learn not to be defeated implies there is a correct and incorrect way to play, and I'm not sure I'd support that notion if it doesn't unduly affect others.

/facepalm

It affects the social NORMS and standards of the game. That gets reflected in the Conventional Wisdom the game's community and population holds to and believes in. It gets reflected in the ATTITUDES that everyone has. It shapes the way that people THINK about the game and how it ought to be played.

The "libertarian" belief that what I do with my character has no effect on what other people do with their characters is an inherently false one, because it assumes that there is no ... cultural ... transmission of ideas and values to others which can in turn result in a toxic brew that affects all of us. That's because the only way this CAN BE true is if you're playing a Single Player game with no one else in it. Since that's NOT what's on order here, the "libertarian" ideal of being able to do whatever you want because it doesn't affect anyone else is a little white lie.

Cinnder wrote:

I personally don't like to be defeated in a game, but if someone else wants to run into a group and die -- just by themselves without causing an unwanted teamwipe or other griefing -- who are we to tell them that's wrong?

Go Darwin Go.

Except they aren't weeding themselves out of the "gene pool" are they? Why? Infinite lives to persist in being stupid with. If there's no "evolutionary pressure" to evolve and improve then a very great many people WON'T evolve and improve. Simple as that.

Stupid but works isn't stupid ... and all that.

So what happens if there's no "weed out" factor for stupid? Stupid flourishes and thrives ... AND TAKES OVER.

Cinnder wrote:

I'd be much more concerned with players who walk away from a game due to frustration with harsh defeat penalties than players who are defeated, pop a Wakie, and jump back in to continue fighting. I'm thinking the primary goal should be to keep players playing, not to prevent them from doing so.

Define "harsh penalties" please. Don't just throw an abstract undefined term like "harsh penalties" around without quantifying it with examples to clarify precisely what you mean.

I'd put "harsh penalties" into context with the following:

When you are Defeated, the game automatically logs you off. To continue, log back in. This is a "harsh" defeat penalty because it forces the player to "work" to stay logged into the game.

When you are Defeated, the game "breaks" all your stuff and steals all your currency. Self explanatory as to why this is a "harsh" defeat penalty.

You only get a limited number of Defeats per hour/day and after you reach that limit you can't play anymore and can't log back in until you've served out your "Death Sentence" by not getting to play for a while. Self explanatory as to why this is a "harsh" defeat penalty.

When you are Defeated, the game "robs" you of resources you have collected ... including currency, items, and the really big one, experience. Get Defeated and lose all progress towards your next Level is one of the "harsher" defeat penalties around. Imagine what it would be like if once you reached the Level Cap you could only *stay there* at the Level Cap for as long as you remained UNdefeated. Why? Because as soon as you got defeated you'd lose an entire LEVEL of experience and no longer be at the Level Cap.

And then there's the granddaddy of them all ... the Sword Art Online death penalty ... where if you die in the game YOU DIE IN REAL LIFE. Welcome to HARDCORE gaming.

Those are what I think of as "harsh" death penalties because they're (so) punitive. The game is going out of its way to punish you for having been defeated.

Things like Star Trek Online's 15 second timeout I consider to be a (very limp) slap on the wrist sort of death penalty because it hurts the player rather than the character. Needless to say, I'm amazed and astounded to see the kind of soccer foul fake melodrama people have put up over even such a WEAK death penalty, which only exacts a game mechanical price when playing in HARD MODE (which, by the way is entirely optional and needs to be actively and affirmatively selected by the player, in advance!). It's just unbelievable!

Anyone who would ragequit a game because they got defeated and couldn't play for 15 seconds is someone who clearly "has issues" and shouldn't be playing social online games.

Defeat as a strategy: what's wrong with that? I'm now thinking of my blaster's beloved Rise of the Phoenix, which (like other death-based powers) seemed to actually encourage defeat. That implies to me that the devs didn't think there was anything too terrible about defeat, even as a strategy. RotP almost felt like a consolation prize to me, as opposed to a penalty.

Recover from Defeat powers fall into a different category ... a "paid for" mitigation category.

And yes, I am looking at Rise of the Phoenix and note that it has a 300 second recharge timer on it. Not 15 seconds ... 300 seconds. 5 minutes. Realistically speaking, in City of Heroes you'd be hard pressed to get that under 90-120 seconds even with outrageously intensive slotting of enhancements. So ... something you couldn't necessarily use EVERY TIME you got defeated, particularly if you're just running in (like an idiot) and getting repeatedly defeated over and over and over again.

In other words, Rise of the Phoenix was a limited resource as opposed to an every time for free resource. And the same holds true for other rez powers in City of Heroes too. They were limited resources that you couldn't use every time. They were situational and "expensive" in the sense that you needed to take/purchase them ahead of time so as to be prepared for defeat later. Needless to say, there were a lot of players who felt that powers that were only good AFTER a defeat were worthless (because they were so awesome they'd NEVER get defeated in the first place!).

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

Death penalties need to be discussed concurrently with the likelihood of unfair deaths. If there are never any unfair deaths, death penalties can be useful* in the manner Redlynne describes, to shape the behavior of the player.

However, I would guess that most of us have experienced another kind of in-game death...the unfair death. The lag death, the fall-through-the-terrain death, the client displaying a fire patch 1 meter to your left but the server thinking it's under your feet. Death penalties in a buggy game or one with inadequate provisions for latency are likely to frustrate the players and detract* from the game's appeal.

*note that this is from a utilitarian perspective and not a moral one.

I think Cinnder's second level of "why" is still a good one to ask. Perhaps there are some character concepts that rely on self-defeat or on being defeated as a battle tactic, or at least the appearance of defeat, to fully express that character's powers or behavior - and we need to consider that villainy is a valid state for characters in CoT. Does CoT wish to serve these players? If so, what is the best way to serve them? Perhaps a self-destruct that has no death penalty or respawn delay? A tertiary power that allows one to play dead? A power that allows someone to "take one for the team", and come back automatically after the fight? I could see many ways to provide options for the players to express some unusual but still worthwhile concepts.

Do you REALLY want "I'm gonna go in there and get killed!" to be an accepted (let alone expected!) behavioral norm in a game? Even if you do have "infinite lives" to expend, do you really want people to get comfortable with trying ... deliberately ... to use them all up as fast as they can, just because they can at no cost?
Or even more to the point ... do you want people to LEARN NOTHING from being Defeated?

Yep. Pretty much.

If people have fun doing it, then that's what I want them to do.

If people don't want to learn, they aren't going to learn.

And if you think having to log back in to the game is more annoying than being told, "You suck. Here, we're going to make it so you can't play the game for 15+ seconds so you can think about that." then we're clearly not going to see eye to eye on this topic.

This entire line of reasoning appears to stem from some idea that most players will approach the game with the premise, "I'm okay with being defeated." In my opinion, people want to win. That's human nature. Most people are going to approach every fight with the idea of being the last person standing. Some may take on insane odds on a lark. A very few may go for the 'suicidal man' approach. Whichever it may be, I doubt these cases will impact anyone, much less the game, sufficiently to warrant some kind of "Darwin is laughing at you because the devs think you're doing it wrong" punishment mechanic.

Hmmm...interesting line of thought. But now I have to step up one more meta-level and ask, why is being defeated in a virtual world a bad thing that we want to discourage? How is it stupid? The suggestion that we should learn not to be defeated implies there is a correct and incorrect way to play, and I'm not sure I'd support that notion if it doesn't unduly affect others.

Gonna try and answer your questions...

Being defeated in a virtual world is not inherently good or bad it just is. Its not stupid or smart. What makes it good or bad, stupid or smart is the conditions that lead to the defeat. Anything from game design to carelessness can be the deciding factor in a defeat. The point is that a player should learn from a defeat so that in a similar situation they are able to not be defeated. If a player does repeat the action and continuously is defeated by the same situation then it would be stupid and bad. If they use the knowledge from being defeated to avoid a repeat then the defeat was good and the player is smart. These are of course very broad strokes but the overall idea is there.

As far as a correct or incorrect way to play....that is a bit trickier to break down as there are so many factors to consider but in the context of the games intention of overcoming obstacles then defeat without learning to avoid a repeat is very much the wrong way to play. In the context of the game defeat is not the end its a setback and as a result should be avoided. When it is not avoided then you are not following the games core concept. That being said, its never so black and white as that because players are people and as such all have different goals, learning curves, playstyles and so forth.

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I personally don't like to be defeated in a game, but if someone else wants to run into a group and die -- just by themselves without causing an unwanted teamwipe or other griefing -- who are we to tell them that's wrong? I'd be much more concerned with players who walk away from a game due to frustration with harsh defeat penalties than players who are defeated, pop a Wakie, and jump back in to continue fighting. I'm thinking the primary goal should be to keep players playing, not to prevent them from doing so..

In a world where people are not affect emotionally by other peoples actions this would work. The problem is as people we have emotions that do not have on off switches. Frustration can set in when your team mate does something you consider stupid not because it affects you now but you begin to worry how it will affect you in the future which means you as the not stupid player begin to take you teammates stupidity into consideration when you play the game.....in other words just seeing a teammate kill himself pointlessly will change how you play the game. I do agree that a harsh penalty that drives players away is an arguably worse result than a stupid player being defeated but there is a middle ground to be explored.

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Defeat as a strategy: what's wrong with that? I'm now thinking of my blaster's beloved Rise of the Phoenix, which (like other death-based powers) seemed to actually encourage defeat. That implies to me that the devs didn't think there was anything too terrible about defeat, even as a strategy. RotP almost felt like a consolation prize to me, as opposed to a penalty..

Defeat can be used as a strategy in certain examples. But they are not the norm or the intention of devs. Any of the self rez powers are there a death penalty mitigation not tool to be used for dying. Just as vengeance (which I will get into more in a sec) was a way to compensate for lost firepower. The idea was that if a team lost a member due to defeat they were now weaker in an already tough battle, vengeance and to a lesser extent RotP like self rez powers were a way to replace that lost firepower until the team could regroup. The fact both were seldom used in this manner was more a product of the games difficulty level than the powers intentions.

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Defeat as an exploit: can you give examples?.

This is where I bring up vengeance again. The intention of vengeance was to be the emotional rage of a character seeing a friend hurt in power form. While not a true exploit it was still gaming the system when a player said I will just run in they will kill me then you cast vengeance and raise me. That is using the power without taking into consideration the spirit in which it was designed. Another gaming the system example is dying to speed up travel. While they are not exploits in the truest sense they were obviously the opposite of intention.

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The real world example of pain when ones sticks fingers in one's eyes is there because blindness would cause a host of difficulties for survival of an organism. In a virtual world, being defeated doesn't keep a player from continuing to play the game or handicap them in some way other than via the types of penalties we're discussing -- but then that's making the warning pain into the very thing the warning is supposed to dissuade. I'm not currently seeing any other bad effect of being defeated -- but remain open to examples.

I have given one over simplified one above but a few more examples might help.

Players who simply refuse to learn to avoid defeat affect the internal numbers of a game. Devs do a thing called datamining. If they see an inordinate amount of deaths while seeing a vocal group of players complain about difficulty levels it could cause them to change the difficulty of the game. This is not just a hypothetical, the self raise powers (including the one you said you used as a strategy) was changed from its original form to include a period of debt freedom. Debt itself was reduced overall. This all had the effect of making the game easier. I am not saying it is wrong that these changes were made just showing that it does happen.

If players who seek to avoid defeat as a personal goal are finding the majority of the teams he plays on are careless about defeat that player may avoid teaming or just stop playing altogether. I myself found that teams seldom shared the same goals in a mission as I did (was not debt but that's not relevant) as a result I preferred to either solo or team just with my small group of friends.

Just two examples out of what could be an infinite well of player experiences. As I said, no one is trying to stop players from how players want to play the game but there is a middle ground that would work for the majority of the players.

Death penalties need to be discussed concurrently with the likelihood of unfair deaths. If there are never any unfair deaths, death penalties can be useful* in the manner Redlynne describes, to shape the behavior of the player..

Sadly there is not mechanic I can think of that will be able to determine an unfair death with a fair one. At least not without some glaring flaws. Its just one of those things a player has to accept when playing a game.

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I think Cinnder's second level of "why" is still a good one to ask. Perhaps there are some character concepts that rely on self-defeat or on being defeated as a battle tactic.

That's all well and good. Character freedom and player freedom is fine. That is something the player chooses to do and as a result should accept the defeat penalty as part of his character and should explain to any team he joins that this unconventional gamestyle and if the team does not like it he will move on. Just as the player who refuses to learn should accept the penalty for playing 'stupid'. The problem is they usually don't and more often than not impact anothers gameplay negatively.

As I said there should be a penalty for being defeated but it should fall in the middle of the extreme and the all but non-existant....

Cinnder, I've already given my answer to this question. Simply asking "why" to every answer, the way a child might, doesn't get you any closer to a solution. All it does is prevent acceptance of the answer you've already been given so as to demand another answer, until you get one you'll like. Recursive "but why?" demands are not inherently reasonable.

/facepalm indeed. I had a feeling you might evade the new meta-question by claiming it was just recursive why-ing, but I had hoped you would be able to admit that this was not the case and accept the entirely new question as my honest attempt to get to the source of the issue. I hadn't quite anticipated that you would add in personal insult, but I suppose I should come to expect this from your general behaviour when people disprove or question your points. It's clear to me that you have decided that anyone who wants to play the game in a way different from your preferred method is "wrong" and you don't really want to analyse the situation. So I'll move on, because I trust the devs to have perspective here, which is what really counts.

Thanks to others who have responded in a civil and engaging fashion. Islandtrevor, I see your points and imagine it's a question of degree. I can see if a lot of people died on purpose all the time, it would indeed have an effect as you say, and this would not be a good thing. However, I think Darth Fez is right that this is unlikely to happen in practice. Just like with using defeat as a strategy: as you point out, there was a timer on defeat powers to keep them from being overused...but the powers still existed, so it seems the devs didn't feel that a defeat strategy was inherently wrong -- only using it too frequently. So I guess that's the middle ground about which you speak, which makes sense to me.

I'll still stick up for anyone who wants to play the game they want to play it as long as they don't negatively affect others too much. Again, as you say, the question is one of degree and middle ground. Someone who annoys an entire team with his/her defeat antics is not a good thing, but I'd expect that problem wouldn't last longer than a single teaming session -- and might not be discouraged by defeat penalties anyway. And, as Scott pointed out, someone could have an interesting character concept that relies on death that, if played well, could actually enhance a team's experience if they liked RPing.

There's also the example of a solo player who dies a lot without affecting anyone else. Of course, solo players would affect datamining as you pointed out, but don't you think it would have to be rather egregious intentional dying for it to affect a game to this degree? Such that I'd expect it would have been commented on enough by players for the devs to be aware before making changes.

We didn't see defeat run wild as a strategy in CoX, and as the OP pointed out the penalty for defeat in CoX was rather light. Can we argue that debt was a light penalty that encouraged players to jump back into the fight and at the same time say it was the bastion preventing rampant intentional defeats? I think this is evidence to back up Darth Fez's point that people generally don't like to be defeated in a game.

Again, I'm not advocating a lack of defeat penalty; just trying to understand the theory behind the assumption that a game "must" have one. Perhaps, to go middle ground again, what really keeps defeat-griefing in check is a combination of some sort of penalty, social pressure, and the general will to succeed. I look forward to hearing what MWM's plans are!

I hated the XP debt. Absolutely hated it. It was pointless in my opinion. And I truly think we should be penalized when we die. It'll prevent us from just running in without thinking.

We should be afraid of dying. We should think twice before attacking and we should have to prepare. If dying has no real penalty, why would you even bother taking your time in missions? The game wouldn't be challenging.

Thanks to others who have responded in a civil and engaging fashion. Islandtrevor, I see your points and imagine it's a question of degree. I can see if a lot of people died on purpose all the time, it would indeed have an effect as you say, and this would not be a good thing. However, I think Darth Fez is right that this is unlikely to happen in practice.

and

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There's also the example of a solo player who dies a lot without affecting anyone else. Of course, solo players would affect datamining as you pointed out, but don't you think it would have to be rather egregious intentional dying for it to affect a game to this degree? Such that I'd expect it would have been commented on enough by players for the devs to be aware before making changes.

A single player no...but many yes. As I pointed out it has happened.

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Just like with using defeat as a strategy: as you point out, there was a timer on defeat powers to keep them from being overused...but the powers still existed, so it seems the devs didn't feel that a defeat strategy was inherently wrong -- only using it too frequently. So I guess that's the middle ground about which you speak, which makes sense to me..

And to me the fact that they had long timers reinforces how defeat is to be avoided but here is a power for those few times when it will happen even though you have been careful. There is nothing wrong with using it as a tactic though....just using it as a tactic and expecting to not suffer the penalties as well....that's unacceptable.

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I'll still stick up for anyone who wants to play the game they want to play it as long as they don't negatively affect others too much. Again, as you say, the question is one of degree and middle ground. Someone who annoys an entire team with his/her defeat antics is not a good thing, but I'd expect that problem wouldn't last longer than a single teaming session -- and might not be discouraged by defeat penalties anyway. And, as Scott pointed out, someone could have an interesting character concept that relies on death that, if played well, could actually enhance a team's experience if they liked RPing..

I am in almost complete agreement with you. We should be able to choose how we play the game. The point I was making is that we should also accept the challenges (such as defeat penalties) that come with it. In other words...you made your bed now sleep in it.

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Again, I'm not advocating a lack of defeat penalty; just trying to understand the theory behind the assumption that a game "must" have one. Perhaps, to go middle ground again, what really keeps defeat-griefing in check is a combination of some sort of penalty, social pressure, and the general will to succeed. I look forward to hearing what MWM's plans are!.

It might (not saying it does...just might) be you not seeing things in a large enough view.

In an MMO you should have many people playing it regularly who on average will seek to find the easiest way to succeed (average meaning the majority of players). Most times the easiest way to play is reckless. If there is no additional challenge to that sort of play it becomes the norm. At this point the game becomes an exercise in pointlessness. As even the thickest of people will eventually get bored with a risk free system that is too easy ...the players will leave the game gets labeled as boring or bad ect. A death penalty is useful to keep the game viable in the long run as it will dissuade the majority of reckless players from that type of play.

If you think about it pretty much every game has a penalty for not succeeding....from pongs scoring system to marios life totals and restarting of the level to MMOs respawn timers.

Redlynne wrote:
Cinnder, I've already given my answer to this question. Simply asking "why" to every answer, the way a child might, doesn't get you any closer to a solution. All it does is prevent acceptance of the answer you've already been given so as to demand another answer, until you get one you'll like. Recursive "but why?" demands are not inherently reasonable.

/facepalm indeed. I had a feeling you might evade the new meta-question by claiming it was just recursive why-ing, but I had hoped you would be able to admit that this was not the case and accept the entirely new question as my honest attempt to get to the source of the issue. I hadn't quite anticipated that you would add in personal insult, but I suppose I should come to expect this from your general behaviour when people disprove or question your points. It's clear to me that you have decided that anyone who wants to play the game in a way different from your preferred method is "wrong" and you don't really want to analyse the situation. So I'll move on, because I trust the devs to have perspective here, which is what really counts.

Wow, Cinnder. Just ... wow.

"Personal insult" ... really? Telling you that I've already answered your question and that asking it again, fishing for a different answer, will result in the same answer, which in this case it does, is a personal insult to you? THAT is your definition of a personal insult? Telling you that doing this is inherently unreasonable is a personal insult to you?

Well, I guess that all just goes back to how a lot of people interpret the First Amendment (effectively like so):

You are free to speak what I wish to hear.

Look, it's FINE that you don't like or agree with or approve of the answer I gave you. But just because I gave a reasoned response to your question that you don't care for doesn't mean that I've personally insulted you.

For one thing, if I *was* trying to personally insult you, I'd know it ... and so would everyone else.

Now ... if you'd like to take back your playing of the Victim Card, I'm perfectly fine with that. I'll even pretend that you didn't try to play it. In fact, I'd vastly prefer that outcome. No hard feelings.

/offer handshake

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

Well, this has pretty much degraded into a pointing and rehashing thread so I'll make one more simple comment and then ignore it.

This is all academic. The Devs, I'm sure, already have something in mind with dealing with defeats and already know how they feel about them. In fact, Tannim has already said that defeated toons will neither be weakened nor will they lose items. Arguments (this has not been a debate for several posts) will not be changing that.

I think Cinnder's second level of "why" is still a good one to ask. Perhaps there are some character concepts that rely on self-defeat or on being defeated as a battle tactic, or at least the appearance of defeat, to fully express that character's powers or behavior - and we need to consider that villainy is a valid state for characters in CoT. Does CoT wish to serve these players? If so, what is the best way to serve them? Perhaps a self-destruct that has no death penalty or respawn delay? A tertiary power that allows one to play dead? A power that allows someone to "take one for the team", and come back automatically after the fight? I could see many ways to provide options for the players to express some unusual but still worthwhile concepts.

Then in that case ... let's game this out. Heck, we'll even use City of Heroes as a touchstone reference point that many of us have experience with.

So ... Powers vs Inspirations vs Hospital vs Base. Those were really the four choices (well, three and half really) you had to recover from a Defeat.

When it comes to rezzing, what could you get out of a Power that you couldn't get out of an Inspiration that you couldn't get out of a Hospital trip or a SG Base Medical Room? Everyone, feel free to add on things I'll probably miss here.

Power (pros)

Additional effects beyond just rez (too numerous to list)

"Immediate" Rez (not counting Animation Time for Power)

Sometimes granted Debt Protection against additional Defeat(s) for X seconds after use

Some were AoE allowing multiple rez of large groups of Allies (famous Oil Slick use for Howling Twilight on Hamidon Raid stunning Back Alley Brawler)

Could be slotted as a Set Mule for Invention Set Bonuses

Convenient to use

Power (cons)

Uses a Power slot

Potential cost in enhancement slots to make "effective" or otherwise useful

Spawns you inside your SG Base, which is useful for Base Raids and can give easy access to Base Teleporters

SG Base resources are available (Temp Powers, Storage, etc.)

Base Medical (cons)

Travel back to location of Defeat (time sink)

Prestige cost of building facilities

The thing that stands out for me from this recitation is ... that Powers really weren't all that much better than use of a Wakie or simply going to the Hospital. Part of the reason for that, in my opinion was because XP Debt was assessed upon Defeat ... rather than my personal choice of being assessed upon Rez.

Uhn ... huhn ... you start to see the subtlety of the difference there? See what I did?

Because here's the interesting thing. If you assess a Death Penalty upon Rez instead of upon Defeat ... that then gives you room to assess different Death Penalty schemes based upon which method is used to get back up!

So say for instance you use a Power to achieve a Rez ... and in the City of Heroes context there is NO Death Penalty if you Rez using a Power. Everyone "cool" with that idea? Note that in order for this to happen, somebody somewhere ... whether it be yourself or someone else ... needs to INVEST in a Power that can be used to Rez. AND ... use of a Power would not be subject to a Lockout Timer, so you can Rez using a Power, either your own or someone else's at any time.

Then you've got "Wakie" Inspirations and use of the Hospital.

So what if you could use a Wakie Inspiration at any time ... but if you're going to Hospital then you have to wait for a Lockout Timer to count down (that 15 seconds I keep talking about). You can justify it as being it takes a little while for the Hospital to signal lock onto you if you need some lore to back things up for the necessary Teleport to respawn you in the Hospital. "Beam me up, I'm dead" and the whole "Getting a lock on you now, sir" response.

I'm thinking that use of Wakies and the Hospital ought to both impose Debt Penalties, which ... again ... in the City of Heroes terms was XP Debt. The difference is that Wakies were effectively an "in place" Rez, while use of the Hospital was not. In that context it was "fair" for Wakies to offer temporary Debt Protection against repeated Defeats in "too short a time span" after trying to get up, so you didn't get "burned" by trying to stand up too fast after falling.

SG Base Medical Rooms were essentially an idea to limit zoning after a Defeat during Base Raids. As such, the SG Base Medical facilities were always inferior to a Zone Hospital because of the "convenience" factor (which, sadly, was never properly realized).

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

The thing that stands out for me from this recitation is ... that Powers really weren't all that much better than use of a Wakie or simply going to the Hospital. Part of the reason for that, in my opinion was because XP Debt was assessed upon Defeat ... rather than my personal choice of being assessed upon Rez.

Uhn ... huhn ... you start to see the subtlety of the difference there? See what I did?

Because here's the interesting thing. If you assess a Death Penalty upon Rez instead of upon Defeat ... that then gives you room to assess different Death Penalty schemes based upon which method is used to get back up!
.

I understand what you are saying and its an interesting concept.
Would this not make self rez powers overly desired though? Much like the fitness pool was originally (maybe not to the same extent but similar).
What are your thoughts on that?

Depends on how "steep" or punishing the Death Penalty is. According to some people in this thread, even being forced to wait 15 seconds to resurrect is "intolerable" (despite the fact that people keep right on playing Star Trek Online just fine with it in). So for some people, ANY Death Penalty at all is apparently more than they can bear. They've been pretty vocal about it in this thread for starters.

It really comes down to a value judgement of whether the "value" of a Death Penalty is too great or not. I know that in the early days, before Inventions, there were characters (usually Blasters) who lived (and died, a lot) at the Debt Cap and basically had to earn double XP all the way to Level 50. That past history and experience informs my preference to not impose an XP Earning Penalty for having been Defeated, simply because doing that punishes the character more than the player. By contrast, however, the 15 second "timeout" before being able to Hospital rez is something that punishes the player more than the character, because it has no game mechanical effect on the character at all ... except in Star Trek Online's higher difficulty settings where a mild yet "permanent" Debuff is assessed (in the 2-5% range of penalizing performance, so hardly noticeable until SERIOUSLY stacked up after a dozen or so Defeats).

I'm of the opinion that a Death Penalty ought to be, on its own, a Minor Inconvenience ... and if stacked up (through repeated stupidity) can grow to become a Major Inconvenience. Without specifics applied, that "feels right" to me to structure things that way. Use of a Power to rez would then be a way to mitigate that Minor Inconvenience and potentially include a Tide Turning effect that buffs Players (either plural or singular, it depends on the Power used).

But you're right there is a "balance" to be achieved such that no one particular choice becomes "too good" relative to the other options such that it becomes the runaway "do this ONLY" choice. You want all paths to resurrection to be equally viable, while at the same time have different advantages (or costs, if you prefer). That way, the decision for which is "best" in any given situation is a value judgement based on the fluidity of the conditions and history of what "happened" rather than a singular choice because the other options are "gimp" by definition.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

Agreed and probably a higher difficulty in the game which results in more deaths would also be a factor.

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According to some people in this thread, even being forced to wait 15 seconds to resurrect is "intolerable" (despite the fact that people keep right on playing Star Trek Online just fine with it in). So for some people, ANY Death Penalty at all is apparently more than they can bear. They've been pretty vocal about it in this thread for starters..

C'mon...no one ever said that....no one has been vocal about removing the defeat penalty. We had someone ask why have it and we had a troll but no one was advocating the removal of a defeat penalty. At best people have opposed YOUR idea of a limited penalty (time out and SO loss). I am not opposed to time out personally but on a psychological level it feels worse to me than just running back from the hospital even though the hospital would in most cases take longer. I think this mostly due to the fact that I have to sit and do nothing.....its like my toy was taken away. I do not like any penalty that lowers a characters effectiveness even if it is a very minor one like the loss of a Single Origin Enhancment. I spent time and effort getting to where I am and it does not seem right to take some of it away...no matter how small.

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-SNIP- my preference to not impose an XP Earning Penalty for having been Defeated, simply because doing that punishes the character more than the player. By contrast, however, the 15 second "timeout" before being able to Hospital rez is something that punishes the player more than the character, because it has no game mechanical effect on the character at all ... -SNIP-..

I get what you are saying, the goal is to give the player incentive to avoid defeats for the most part. Im not sure that the XP debt is not a punishment to the player but I get it. I do not like the idea of an XP debt mechanic either. I just have different reasons. For me it does not fit in with the desired goal. The player must learn to avoid defeat or your character has a harder time learning new things. I dunno....Im probably not explaining well as its not really an issue with the mechanics of it but more an emotional response.

Personally, as I said before, I like the direct currency reduction. It fits in the context of the currency concept that CoH had (influence and infamy). Getting defeated means the people you have influence with lose a bit of faith in you and your stock goes down. A villain getting beat means the oppressed people see a light at the end of the tunnels.....that kinda idea.

Of course this depends on if CoT uses a similar concept for currency.

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I'm of the opinion that a Death Penalty ought to be, on its own, a Minor Inconvenience ... and if stacked up (through repeated stupidity) can grow to become a Major Inconvenience. Without specifics applied, that "feels right" to me to structure things that way. Use of a Power to rez would then be a way to mitigate that Minor Inconvenience and potentially include a Tide Turning effect that buffs Players (either plural or singular, it depends on the Power used)..

I agree in that kind of ramping penalty concept. Im not sold on the idea of a way to mitigate what I would hope to be a minor penalty for a single defeat. The player still was KO'd after all. I am leaning towards the advantage of an instant return, possible buff and freeing up a spot in the inspiration library is enough of a benefit for the power that it does not need to mitigate the cost of defeat. I also still see this death penalty mitigation effect being limited to just self rez powers being an issue. Perhaps I would feel better about it if it wasn't limited to just a select few powers that not everyone can get....

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But you're right there is a "balance" to be achieved such that no one particular choice becomes "too good" relative to the other options such that it becomes the runaway "do this ONLY" choice. You want all paths to resurrection to be equally viable, while at the same time have different advantages (or costs, if you prefer). That way, the decision for which is "best" in any given situation is a value judgement based on the fluidity of the conditions and history of what "happened" rather than a singular choice because the other options are "gimp" by definition..

That would be perfect. Problem is I have absolutely no idea how to achieve this properly. If anyone has suggestions on how to achieve this effect please speak up.

In CoH when I died I had a few options to being Rezzed:
1) Hospital
2) Wakie
3) Rez Power (from self or ally)

Now option 3 was either very limited (self) or required a teammate which was also limited in they had to have the correct powerset AND take that power. I can honestly ay that most teams I was with did NOT include a person with a teammate rez power.

Option 2 was doable when solo, but less likely at low level when you only had a small number of Insps to either get a Wakie or combine 3 into a wakie (I LOVED this feature by the way). Again on a team others could give you a Wakie or other Insps for you to combine into a Wakie and the more people the better the chance of this to be available but Solo at low/mid levels its less likely

Option 1 is available to all no matter solo/team, and doesn't matter if you die again within 5 seconds of re-entering the mission.

One of the penalties of dying and using the Hospital was having to go all the way back to the mission door, or to where the mobs you are trash collecting. That is in effect the same as saying "wait x seconds" but even more so as it usually longer than 15 seconds to get back to the mission I was doing, even with Travel Powers.

Like others have said most people dont like their characters to die and will learn what works and what doesn't (ie: Blaster attacking a group of 10 white enemies is going to be in trouble). Having any kind of Death penalty that affects my ability to get back into the fight (Dam/Acc debuff, inability to Rez for 15/30/45+ seconds, etc) also hurts those who RP being heroic in their sacrifice. Now I never did much RPing so its not what I would do but that doesn't mean its an invalid point of view. MANY people liked RPing on CoH and if that what they want then let them without giving them a significant enough penalty.

Also with the money sink idea with dying, we should also look at putting a cap on how OFTEN you are billed. Lets say you are having a real bad day and just cant stay alive. Or are trying to run through a level WAY above your level and keep on getting ganked/sniped by the +7 level enemies. You could end up losing almost all your cash simply by having a bad day, or if your Internet speeds are crap lagged to death.

In response to the opinion or observation that "people are clamoring for "No Defeat Penalty" as the new norm" I want to just say that if the devs gave us everything people were clamoring for, nobody would ever die, lose in PVP, have to pay money for anything, ever, or be unable to find a shiny that they think they want.

Any way you slice it, that ain't happening. The devs, as I understand it, are going to err on the side of caution (or on the side of being similar to CoX anyway) and make it pretty close to what we had in CoX. I can't point you to a post by a dev that says this, but I vaguely remember one, somewhere. And of course everything they say is still not set in stone (or binary code) yet anyway.

I'd also like to point out, in response to the "not everyone hates penalty for defeat as a concept" statement that from where I sit, Red and I seem to me to be two of the not very many people on these forums who think a more serious penalty for defeat than what CoX had wouldn't be altogether awful, or at least that it could be done without being altogether awful, if they did it right.

On another note, I'd like to posit the idea that you could have a game where there's not USUALLY a great "time out" or swag-loss penalty for defeat, but then in some missions, TFs, trials, etc there is (like the jail maps that CoX had). Also, in a "no jail time or swag loss penalty for defeat, usually" type game, you could have a whole category of (rare?) enhancements for powers that DO have a chance of randomly disappearing when you get defeated, and have advantages in other areas that offset that particular drawback. If that were the case, people would have to re-up their gear every so often, not to get better gear, but to replace the gear they've lost (you all know the drill, you've played games). This would hopefully lead to more people REplaying more content for the swag.

As far as somebody's question of "Why even make defeat a thing people want to avoid at all? Isn't intentionally getting killed a lot a valid play style choice?" , my answer would be "No, getting killed on purpose is not a 'valid play style', it's a ridiculous, stupid, lazy short cut that the game, as written, should strongly discourage people from taking as much as humanly possible." because allowing people to die on purpose for no great loss of any kind seems totally asinine on every level I think about it. For one thing, devs are writing missions, etc based on the premise that people will try to remain alive as much as possible. Simply being able to multiple-suicide your way through a mission makes what one would expect to be a big sacrifice and turns it into a "well, I guess I just die and rez here, that's easy" fait accompli. An example of this, from Cox, was the Lady Grey TF. You could just callously let the hostage die and complete the mission faster. That was stupid and was an oft-exploited loophole, in my opinion, and I personally wish it were fixed. If "rescue the hostage" is the mission, you fail if you just cap the sucker yourself. That's what a bleeping rescue mission is, you have to exit the map with the hostage intact. Second, powers that DO require you to die to use them, or require a fresh friendly corpse (like Vengeance from CoX) tend to be designed such that they are intended to be used only in times of dire need (like when the party is already partially wiped, but not totally done) and thus, I feel, those powers ought to be useful only in the somewhat rare instances when you actually are getting beat that badly. The idea of making a power like that is that the drawback of needing to user or a teammate to die should bring with it some added compensation in the form of a REALLY big damage or strong team buff, or whatever. Making that a drawback that allows the devs to make a power more powerful to compensate is based on the assumption then that people will only die infrequently because they will usually be trying like hell to avoid death as much as possible. Thus you need to give people a good reason to avoid death as much as possible, in order to ensure that the cost of using those powers is as it was intended. Otherwise the inherent drawback of "this power needs to target a teammate's corpse to work" turns into no problem at all and the power is just overpowered and broken. I always thought it was a lame exploit that people used to volunteer to die for Vengeance in CoX after the debt ceased to be a problem. Lastly, in any game where you tend to place yourself in the persona of a character that is your in-game presence (i.e. in any RPG really) what the hell kind of sense of immersion can you get if there's no reason not to kill yourself? Seriously. Where is the heroism in standing up to the big baddy against all odds when you know that it doesn't matter if you get killed? How does the arch-villain laugh maniacally at the do-gooders that he has defeated if they totally killed him like SIX times already first? It's just bad.

In response to the opinion or observation that "people are clamoring for "No Defeat Penalty" as the new norm.

No one is asking for this much less clamoring for it.

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Any way you slice it, that ain't happening. The devs, as I understand it, are going to err on the side of caution (or on the side of being similar to CoX anyway) and make it pretty close to what we had in CoX. I can't point you to a post by a dev that says this, but I vaguely remember one, somewhere. And of course everything they say is still not set in stone (or binary code) yet anyway.

Its in this thread.

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I'd also like to point out, in response to the "not everyone hates penalty for defeat as a concept" statement that from where I sit, Red and I seem to me to be two of the not very many people on these forums who think a more serious penalty for defeat than what CoX had wouldn't be altogether awful, or at least that it could be done without being altogether awful, if they did it right..

This is just not true. Most agree that a penalty is in order they just do not like the suggestions so far.

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On another note, I'd like to posit the idea that you could have a game where there's not USUALLY a great "time out" or swag-loss penalty for defeat, but then in some missions, TFs, trials, etc there is -SNIP-.

This idea leans to far towards a gear grind system for my tastes.

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As far as somebody's question of "Why even make defeat a thing people want to avoid at all? Isn't intentionally getting killed a lot a valid play style choice?" , my answer would be "No, getting killed on purpose is not a 'valid play style', it's a ridiculous, stupid, lazy short cut that the game, as written, should strongly discourage people from taking as much as humanly possible." because allowing people to die on purpose for no great loss of any kind seems totally asinine on every level I think about it.

The only reason the game should have a defeat penalty is to provide a reason to not be careless/lazy. It should not 'strongly discourage' players from exploring other avenues of playstyle, taking risks, looking for alternative methods for success.

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For one thing, devs are writing missions, etc based on the premise that people will try to remain alive as much as possible..

As I said previously this is an oversimplification. People are playing the game and people have different playstyles, learning curves, personal goals ect. The devs understand this and do not call repeated defeats wrong....they will safeguard against exploits and the careless/lazy player but will not hinder the inventive one.

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I always thought it was a lame exploit that people used to volunteer to die for Vengeance in CoX after the debt ceased to be a problem.

As I said, its not in the spirit of the power.

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Lastly, in any game where you tend to place yourself in the persona of a character that is your in-game presence (i.e. in any RPG really) what the hell kind of sense of immersion can you get if there's no reason not to kill yourself? Seriously. Where is the heroism in standing up to the big baddy against all odds when you know that it doesn't matter if you get killed? How does the arch-villain laugh maniacally at the do-gooders that he has defeated if they totally killed him like SIX times already first? It's just bad..

You get as much immersion as you personally see. I am going to assume that what you mean by this is the immersion is lost for YOU and not telling me that I loose immersion in these cases.

Radiac man can I ask you to split these long paragraphs up a bit...they are a bugger to read.

I'd like to start by saying that I haven't completely read all of this thread. With that being said, I'd also like to point out a play style from the Repeat Offenders Network. It's called the Faithful Fans of Fallout. In which one person was designated as the bomb. Basically they'd run into a mob with all toggles turned off and just die. After that their carcass was hauled around by the means of Recall Friend and proceeded to be blown up with Vengeance and Fallout in the middle of a giant mob of bad guys. Fun stuff! You wouldn't believe how many people were dying to become the bomb. See what I did there? LOL.

I'm terrible at quoting people using markup tags, so I'm going to do this one the old fashioned way, and for that I apologize:

islandtrevor72 wrote: "The only reason the game should have a defeat penalty is to provide a reason to not be careless/lazy. It should not 'strongly discourage' players from exploring other avenues of playstyle, taking risks, looking for alternative methods for success. "

I have several things to say in response to this:

1. Providing a reason not to be careless/lazy is, in my mind, the same thing as strongly discouraging people from volunteering to die on purpose if there's some in-game mission objective or goal that can be easily shortcutted by doing so. What you're calling a play style option I call a complete circumvention of the game itself.

2. Taking risks is only ever possible when the person taking the risk stands to lose something if things don't break their way. If there is no great penalty for defeat, then there are no risks being taken, because one does not stand to lose much of anything when one rolls the dice and craps out.

3. Intentionally letting yourself be defeated is not, by the definition of the words "success" and "defeat", an alternative method for success. Success would equate to AVOIDING defeat through game play, intentionally ALLOWING oneself to be defeated is the 180 degree opposite of success. In cases where a mission could be won or archvillain defeated by someone making the grand gesture of taking one for the team and throwing themself on the proverbial grenade, that gesture is meaningless if the would-be martyr isn't actually losing anything valuable to himself or herself in the process.

On the subject of making the game more gear grindy, I'm personally okay with that, in the instance I mentioned, i.e. having SOME gear that can be destroyed. Not all of it, just SOME pieces here and there, but good ones.

This is just not true. Most agree that a penalty is in order they just do not like the suggestions so far.

So far, the only Defeat Penalty I've seen people approve of in this thread is "NONE."

Not "none of the above" ... just "none." Every time a suggestion is offered, there is a collective turning up of noses followed by "I don't want that" and the inevitable "take it away." The pattern is actually quite stark if you read from the beginning and are looking for it.

islandtrevor72 wrote:

The only reason the game should have a defeat penalty is to provide a reason to not be careless/lazy. It should not 'strongly discourage' players from exploring other avenues of playstyle, taking risks, looking for alternative methods for success.

In which case you're stuck with an "Eye of the Beholder" standard, which by the way no one is going to agree on. You wind up with a to-MAY-to vs to-MAH-to difference of interpretation that resolves nothing for everyone (the old "you can't please everyone" problem).

Diablo II had a Hardcore mode to it. Your character gets ONE Life. You die and you'll never be allowed to play that character ever again. LOTS of people made Hardcore characters. There was an entire item economy on Hardcore that was separate from Softcore (where you could rez as many times as you wanted to). Lots of people played ONLY Hardcore, even after their beloved and cherished characters got killed and could never be played again.

The mark of a Hero ... what makes you Heroic ... isn't the ability to curbstomp your adversaries without a thought (or care). The mark of a Hero is to be able to pick yourself up after facing adversity and not "winning" the first time, but persevering to keep fighting. It's the courage to go on when others would give up or turn back that makes a Hero a Hero.

Villains are kinda sorta the same, although in their case it's the Recurring Villain trope. ^_~

Which is why I find the notion that people would (rage)quit the game if they couldn't play it for 15 seconds after being Defeated to be utterly ludicrous. It borders on the "revenge" move of holding your breath to make someone else "sorry" for what they've done. It's one of those "if you can't handle this then you're really not cut out to be a superhero/supervillain" kinds of deals.

What do you do when Instant Gratification isn't fast enough?

islandtrevor72 wrote:

they will safeguard against exploits and the careless/lazy player but will not hinder the inventive one.

THIS right here is absolutely spot on.

Also, you shouldn't put game developers on the Omniscient Pedestal. For one thing, the developers are people like us, who want to make the best game possible. The difference is that the developers are RESPONSIBLE for how a game plays and how it is received and perceived by its playerbase. Best not to fetishize them with $DIETY-like wisdom and foresight. Getting things "just right" and keeping them balanced is a VERY tricky thing to do over time.

islandtrevor72 wrote:

Quote:
I always thought it was a lame exploit that people used to volunteer to die for Vengeance in CoX after the debt ceased to be a problem.
As I said, its not in the spirit of the power.

The biggest offender for this combination was the use of Recall Friend followed by Vengeance (followed by Rez or Wakie), so as to get access to the Buff from the most tactically advantageous and prepared location.

The simplest solution to the exploit would have been to make it such that use of Recall Friend (to reposition the Fallen) would disallow use of Vengeance on that $Target. The rationale would be that you could only cast Vengeance in the location where the Defeated had fallen ... instead of back someplace where it was "safe" and you could exploit the game mechanics to maximum effect and benefit. Other use of Player "corpses" Powers would then follow suit so as to prevent this kind of exploit from occurring with Nuke Powers.

islandtrevor72 wrote:

Radiac man can I ask you to split these long paragraphs up a bit...they are a bugger to read.

I second that motion ... and I even write WALLS OF TEXT in some of my posts, complete with warnings at the front of them.

—

Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.

I think you have missed the general point I was trying to make. Let me try and use this post to expand on the thought.

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1. Providing a reason not to be careless/lazy is, in my mind, the same thing as strongly discouraging people from volunteering to die on purpose if there's some in-game mission objective or goal that can be easily shortcutted by doing so. What you're calling a play style option I call a complete circumvention of the game itself..

If we only had to look at things in a binary sense of people who try to live and those who die on purpose then yes they are the same. But when you factor in that people are all different and that we all have different reflexes, learning curves ect then a harsh penalty is no longer teaching the player to avoid defeat but discouraging them from playing the game.

What I am saying is do not look at the extremes to decide the penalty but think about the middle area....those who do not learn as fast, do not get to play as much or the very young ect. You are not going to teach the extremes anything...those who want to live at all cost will try and do so regardless and those who want to exploit and die will do so....a defeat mechanic will have no effect on them so focus on those it will..

Yes have the mechanic just to stop bad habit from setting in but don't punish someone because they have not mastered the game. Middle ground. Not easy not Harsh...middle.

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2. Taking risks is only ever possible when the person taking the risk stands to lose something if things don't break their way. If there is no great penalty for defeat, then there are no risks being taken, because one does not stand to lose much of anything when one rolls the dice and craps out. .

You are still arguing like I am advocating a minimal to no defeat mechanic. I am not. In fact I have stated that a player should understand that a defeat will come with a penalty no matter what. I am saying that when you start to lean too far to a harsh defeat penalty then you are discouraging the creativity of the players.

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3. Intentionally letting yourself be defeated is not, by the definition of the words "success" and "defeat", an alternative method for success. Success would equate to AVOIDING defeat through game play, intentionally ALLOWING oneself to be defeated is the 180 degree opposite of success. In cases where a mission could be won or archvillain defeated by someone making the grand gesture of taking one for the team and throwing themself on the proverbial grenade, that gesture is meaningless if the would-be martyr isn't actually losing anything valuable to himself or herself in the process..

Again we have a different view on the idea. For one I do not think anyone is saying no defeat penalty. For another there are reasons a player may be defeated that is not about the success of a mission but the success of a personal goal. I myself experimented with many builds and tactics which got me defeat a lot before I was able to solo a GM outside PI. If the penalty was too harsh Or took too long to recover from I would never have done so. All those guides about how to beat the RTF or STF were made by people who got defeated a lot when the penalty was pretty much non existent. (level 50). So when you start thinking about alternative playstyles and success maybe you can understand where I am coming from even if you don't agree.

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On the subject of making the game more gear grindy, I'm personally okay with that, in the instance I mentioned, i.e. having SOME gear that can be destroyed. Not all of it, just SOME pieces here and there, but good ones..

I can respect that's how you feel ...I do not...but grinding is at best distantly related to this topic so will leave it at that. If you post a thread about it I will carry on there explaining my reasoning.

So far, the only Defeat Penalty I've seen people approve of in this thread is "NONE."

Not "none of the above" ... just "none." Every time a suggestion is offered, there is a collective turning up of noses followed by "I don't want that" and the inevitable "take it away." The pattern is actually quite stark if you read from the beginning and are looking for it.
.

I gotta do this because I would really like to get past this....here are a bunch of quick quotes from the thread....

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The point of this post? - CoT please don't have death overly impact on the gameplay, yes there should be a consequence but i think CoH proved it doesn't need to be particularly detrimental. I can't be doing with mmos which make me run for 10 minutes before i get back to my body and can rez. It's just not fun.

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I liked CoX's debt system too, although I think there could have been more debt, frankly.

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I'm all for having some kind of debt penalty in CoT that's significant enough to encourage players to generally want to "avoid" dying. But by the same token I think a penalty like losing an enhancement (randomly or otherwise) is far too extreme under normal circumstances.

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Or another way would be to get debt and maybe say a slight penalty in how much influence or Rae's you get per enemy defeated.

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or Perhaps after being defeated you operate at a diminished capacity and you can choose to either continue, digging deep into your reserves to overcome despite the thrashing you just took (maybe with bonus exp if you actually pull it off) or you retreat and seek to recover from the ordeal.

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My vote would be for CoT to handle this the same way CoX did, for all the reasons the OP already mentioned..

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There should be some discomfort for dying, and the XP debt system did that without stopping "forward progress" of your character. The ability to get right back in and try again kept you from throwing up your hands and giving up (ragequitting)..

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That would indeed mitigate the problem somewhat. But why do we want to increase the punishment for using the hospital option? I would have thought having to trek back to the mission (in addition to the debt) was punishment enough for choosing to "Hospital.".

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It would be a shame if any death penalty gave players second thoughts about having a go at something "just because" or "what's the worst that can happen?".

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I'm just a second-tier scribbler and have little say in anything inside the game, especially mechanics-wise, but I've always thought the "your gear is now broken!" trope of dying in a game was the most irritating and insulting thing a developer could put in (beyond pay-to-win), so I'm hoping we don't go that way either.

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i would see some pain for dying. i think coh ramped up the pain if you died too many times close together too..

This is where you started lamenting people as if they did not wish to have any defeat penalty

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It's kind of amazing how people want to have zero negative reinforcement ... of any kind, anywhere, for any reason. Even a slap on the wrist (that can be avoided!) is too much for some people. It's just astounding, really..

Which resulted in

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Since no one on this thread said anything of the kind, I'll assume we're now on a tangent of completely unrelated things that amaze us, and I'll contribute my own: I'm amazed when a person who is capable of expressing a detailed, logical argument can -- when his/her opinion is questioned -- resort to over-dramatic petulance instead of responding to people's reasonable questions and counter-points..

Then back on track

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I think broken Enhancements could be done if broken does not mean lost. They could require repair wich would serve as money drain, without the level of frustration a complete loss would bring..

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There is the option to go with an approach that is less reminiscent of being smacked on the nose with a newspaper.

For example, each death could go toward filling up a counter or providing a clue
.

You again decry peoples opposition to damaging equipment and give a valid (even if I don't agree with it ) reason why it should be done.
A dev speaks up

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We have talked about what defeat looks like for the game. While I can't release details, I can say that we will not be imposing detrimental effects on a defeated character or reducing effectiveness of powers (like breaking, reducing, of slotted improvements)..

Back on track

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That's good to hear; using a simple/casual defeat system as the baseline leaves the door open to solutions that will keep all players interested.

I think it's relatively easy for anyone who desires a more hardcore defeat penalty to impose it on themselves, especially if the players are given the tools for it (similar to what CoH had)
.

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If the death penaly is lenient, it also encourages more casual teaming up and taking silly risks. And CoH was fun partly because you COULD take a silly risk now and again and not be harshly penalized for doing so..

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I had no problem with XP debt. I found it to be a very mild incentive to play intelligently without being too tough if your preferred tactic was the Scream and Leap Technique™..

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Well, the only actual penalty you can have on death is lost time. The only question is when the lost time is going to be..

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More seriously death was always more of a penalty for me because I didn't want to die ... not something the designers really have any control over beyond making it a punishment strong enough that it starts to interfere with my fun and that is not a good thing..

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nobody likes to fail. that and the time cost of returning along with xp debt was enough of a penalty..

This is the closest post to asking for insignificant penalty and even it acknowledges that some penalty is not detrimental.

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Some of my fondest memories in CoH are getting into something over my head, failing several times, and then recruiting backup from supergroup or even asking in general chat. It was fun because 1) I could fail without significant penalty, and 2) others could help me without much risk to themselves..

Many of the post after this are discussing the options that have been present (xp debt, gear damge ect) until Cinnder asked

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Maybe I could understand some of these alternate death penalty suggestions if we stepped back one level and answered the question: what is the purpose in having a penalty for being defeated? Why does there have to be any penalty at all for defeat other than the personal embarrassment?.

You replied to it....he wanted a deeper understanding...you tried to do it....both seemed upset at the replies ect ect ect.

Any post I skipped in the thread were directly stating support or opposition to one of the penalty proposals but none went so far as to deny some form of penalty.

Everyone honestly seems to want some form of defeat penalty. They just do not seem to be in favor of any that have been suggested other than a general agreement that CoH was an OK place to start. In truth there have been very few actual suggestions for a new death penalty. They seem to amount to:
1-Gear damage
2-Xp
3-Time Out
4-Currency Cost.

Can we stop saying everyone wants no penalty now?

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Which is why I find the notion that people would (rage)quit the game if they couldn't play it for 15 seconds after being Defeated to be utterly ludicrous.

I too would find that an overreaction. The only one who implied this was SandTrout and to me his statement was an exaggeration to prove his point (not a fan of that style of argument but have been know to use it from time to time). I don't think he would actually rage quit over a 15 second time out but even if he would he is hardly people...he is a person...singular. Not the norm. One outlying example is not a trend. I had one person say they liked my suggestion of a currency cost for defeat...does not mean people are raving about it in the streets (drat theres that exaggeration)

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Also, you shouldn't put game developers on the Omniscient Pedestal. For one thing, the developers are people like us, who want to make the best game possible.

Im really not. Its why I used the word safeguard and not prevent. I seldom deal in absolutes. I did slightly misspeak though. I meant to say the devs SHOULD not WOULD know this and SHOULD not WOULD safeguard. The point I was making is that the devs are not ogres or carebears ...they probably will lean towards the middle not the extremes.

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In which case you're stuck with an "Eye of the Beholder" standard, which by the way no one is going to agree on. You wind up with a to-MAY-to vs to-MAH-to difference of interpretation that resolves nothing for everyone (the old "you can't please everyone" problem)..

C'mon. You know very well that no one is expecting that everyone to be pleased by it. You also know that there is a middle ground that will be acceptable to the majority. Seriously you are smarter than this Red. You can look at those who will accept nothing short of what they want and have no desire to compromise and know they are to be ignored in this type of discussion.

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The simplest solution to the exploit would have been to make it such that use of Recall Friend (to reposition the Fallen) would disallow use of Vengeance on that $Target.

There were a million and one ways this could be stopped from being a tactic....the fact that CoH never did speaks volumes on what they considered acceptable. I would like to think that CoT will not follow suit.

Also with the money sink idea with dying, we should also look at putting a cap on how OFTEN you are billed. Lets say you are having a real bad day and just cant stay alive. Or are trying to run through a level WAY above your level and keep on getting ganked/sniped by the +7 level enemies. You could end up losing almost all your cash simply by having a bad day, or if your Internet speeds are crap lagged to death.

As an idea from Wildstar: I can die *several* times in a single dungeon and still come out "ahead" in terms of money for the day. Of course, this is also dependant on how much time you spend playing the game.

Right now I am learning one of the veteran dungeons, and so it isn't uncommon for us (the group that is) to wipe completely several times on the boss until we can execute it properly. This is also the *Hard* Mode dungeon, not the basic version.

At level cap, a death is about 1gold 50 silver cost. Killing a group of mobs in the open world nets you about 20 silver (cash, and other loot). I can quite easily after playing the game for an hour to build up funds, quite easily wipe 20 times in the space of a few hours in a dungeon and still come out ahead overall in terms of money gain.

Hell, I have right now over 50 plat (1 plat = 100 gold). so for me, dying is no skin off my nose. And considering that I can easily earn 100 gold per *day* in 90 minutes just by doing my dailies, wiping in a dungeon at level cap is not really a money drain (although it helps take money out of the economy). And better I get at the dungeons the less I will die, the more money I will save...

and apart from the repair costs, there are no other real death penalties in Wildstar. If you die, you have to wait 5 seconds before you can choose to resurrect at a grave yard[1]. If there is a player near by, they can rez you for free[2]. Or you can choose to rez on the spot (has a cost, which is 7gold 50 silver at level cap)[3]. All of the resurrection methods in Wildstar have no form of "rez sickness" which degrades your performance in any shape or form. However you can only choose to rez in your location once per 30 minutes.

Deaths via PvP (for PvP servers) works slightly differently. Duelling [4] though doesn't actually "defeat you", so you can duel others as much as you want, as long as you go through the right method to do it.

But to further carry on for the latter part, that will always be a risk for going into a place that you are too "low level" for. Hell, it could happen in City of Heroes if you took the wrong turn out of atlas park

Ooops, steel canyon.. *dies*

*finds himself 1/2 across the map with lots of high level mobs between him and the "low level zone" exit*

Crap.

Yep, happened to me early in the games life, and I spent a long time trying to get back out of there... in the end after waiting for about 90 minutes for a nice higher level player to TP to the zone exit so I could carry on my merry way... but it was a long time waiting for help though.
[1] Full shields, half health at the start, gear damage.
[2] Full shields, Full Health, gear damage
[3] Full shields, half health at the start, gear damage
[4] One Vs One PvP system.

—

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1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

I think we should just keep it similar in regards to CoH. Incur debt slowing down leveling, respawn in a hospital located a distance away from the mission therefore setting a form of time-out that isn't time-out in which you are just twiddling your thumbs and picking your nose while you wait for your character to be able to at least DO SOMETHING, and if we add anything to it we make some form of hospital fee if the hospital is used. I am completely against enhancement degredation or loss. I have never liked having to repair gear or losing gear that I spent a long time trying to acquire. Why should people avoid dying? Because dying sucks! Because dying is not doing something Heroic. Because dying means you didn't get to take down that boss. Because dying means you don't get to help your friends. That should be deterrent enough.

Its worth noting that for items in most MMO's that suffer from the "item damage" it normally takes a *considerable* number of deaths before it becomes "useless". Infact, most of the time it becomes that slight case of "wrapping up the day" style of thing, that so many CoX'ers seemed to do with their salvage/items.

I would put this on a similar line of making sure that all of your enhancements were even level for you, even though they were still working fine -1 level to you.

I have *NEVER* known someone in a themepark MMO to actually "lose" gear because they forgot to repair it. It is also something that you can tweak to balance out (ie number of deaths/repair costs can be tweaked accordingly... and this can scale up with rarity for the better gear).

Now, even having a hospital fee... I know that some people would complain about that.... why should they lose money because they died? Why should they be *penalised* for not having an awaken, or a self rez in their build?

Sure, I am now picking arguments out of my rear, but trying to make it as balanced as possible across the board does help.

Hell, you could even have it so that there is a "tick box" in options so that when you go to the repair place it does it *automatically* for you (or even at a generic vendor), so that you have to do *nothing* whilst you are dealing with your other tasks.

I know that some people dislike the clicking to repair stuff, but that is why most of the other games have addons that allow you to do it (please note: this is normally due to an interesting choice in what the addon API can allow... if it can auto click a button, then it can make it fast for the user). So by trying to make it as much in the background as possible, could that help alleviate your problem?

In that when you die, the amount of money you lose on *coming back* (depending on method of coming back) varies? And a modifier of what enhancements you had slotted (so those fully level 50 purpled out players would have a higher "rez cost" compared to a level 50 in just generic IO's who would then be more expensive than a level 50 in SO's?)

But then again... if you look at what some other people have mentioned in other threads... they actually *abused* the CoX death mechanic to be a mobile bomb which exponentially improved the ability of their team mates.

((side note: This could be resolved by making the player auto release to the hospital after X period of time... with the hospital being a "safe place" from PvPers and enemy mobs))

Unfortunately, the "repair" mechanic/death penalty (they tend to now be more on the gear you have, rather than *affecting* player performance directly (although WoW has rez sickness if you graveyard rez, although getting back to your body gives you no sickness), is also a form of cash sink that *helps* alleviate currency inflation.

It doesn't remove it fully... but it can help as a in game currency sink.

Hell, even Eve Online is not immune to currency inflation... and that has full ship (and most module) loss on ship death, and then your implants on top. For the good player though, they can alleviate most of these outgoings, so whilst losing a ship can cost the player in game cash (especially if they are insured ships) you can more often than not make an order of magnitude more money per ship destruction (ie if a ship cost you 10 million to buy and fit, most people would make 100million if not more before it gets lost due to accident/pvp.

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Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Yeah, still no to the degredation and repair gear. Hate that crap, don't want to do it. Doesn't make sense to a Super Hero MMO unless you were purely a gadgeteer, and even that would suck because you'd be the only person having to deal with that. I don't care if it takes forever for gear to degrade to the point it gets destroyed, the point is that it can and sometimes I get so distracted I don't pay attention to that and I have lost stuff because of it. Also from what I recall I believe a Dev has already said that there will be no enhancement degredation anyways, so arguing that point is pointless.

So just have it as a standard cost to resurrect at the hospital then that is dependant on the type of enhancements you have slotted.

No item degradation, just using the enhancements as a modifier value just that a level 50 purpled out hero would have a higher cost associated with them (payable by the dead player when they come back, limit being "all their remaining funds if they don't have enough to cover the cost"... so if they have no cash, it is effectively "free" for them).

You can even do it so that if a player takes the hospital route, they have the highest cost compared to a consumable rez (wakies for example) which are then more expensive than a "player" rez (Resurrection from Empathy for example). Players self resurrection would have no cost, but they are typically on a timer, so you could make it so that this recharge is non modifiable (or long enough to not be abusable).

Would that help?

Why not go the CoX route and go even lighter... remove XP debt. Make it so that all characters can resurrect on the spot, that would make it more heroic (wouldn't it?) so that they can just zerg the boss to death....

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Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Wakies do carry the cost, so to speak, of using a boost slot. If someone carries half a dozen wakies, just in case, that's half dozen other boosts that may have prevented the death in the first place.

One possibility to consider is a kind of insurance (although I'd hate to use that particular term). Health care membership? Yeah... anyway. For a monthly payment the character obtains that particular level of service. With no payment the character may be hit with that 15 second delay in service (another benefit of premium membership: no queues!*), pay the largest cost for the hospital visit, etc., etc. At the lowest level there may be no queue (or guarantee that the queue won't become longer), the next reduces the cost of the visit, etc. The highest level may even include an insta-rez on, say, a 30 minute or 1 hour cooldown.

However the details pan out, it remains a resource sink and the player can basically choose the severity of the death penalty.

So just have it as a standard cost to resurrect at the hospital then that is dependant on the type of enhancements you have slotted.

My issue isn't that I'm afraid of a defeat penalty, it's that shoehorning enhancements into the "physical gear" model is repulsive. Pretending it's only "kinda sorta" gear degradation and look at the birdie! just adds insult to injury.

I'd be in favor of a direct currency penalty. I'd prefer currency debt in addition to and analogous to CoH's experience debt, with the rate of currency debt being doubled at the level cap because experience is redundant there. I wouldn't want to see it tied to enhancements in any way, though.

Quote:

You can even do it so that if a player takes the hospital route, they have the highest cost compared to a consumable rez (wakies for example)
...
Would that help?

It would seriously make it worse. "I got injured, so I immediately got professional help. I was impaired for some time afterward. Next time, I just walked it off and I was fine." Doesn't make sense, unless the defeat penalty this applies to is limited to things like influence or faction reputation. Then it could be explained that seeing him in the emergency room all beaten to hell caused people to start taking Captain Invincible lightly, because he sure didn't look very invincible that day.

One possibility to consider is a kind of insurance (although I'd hate to use that particular term). Health care membership? Yeah... anyway. For a monthly payment the character obtains that particular level of service. With no payment the character may be hit with that 15 second delay in service (another benefit of premium membership: no queues!*), pay the largest cost for the hospital visit, etc., etc. At the lowest level there may be no queue (or guarantee that the queue won't become longer), the next reduces the cost of the visit, etc. The highest level may even include an insta-rez on, say, a 30 minute or 1 hour cooldown..

I suppose it could be put in the store as a kind of perk to purchase but that leans too far towards the pay to win formula for my tastes.

I just do not want to see any penalty that stops you from actually controlling your character for a period of time. As I said I would rather the long walk from a hospital everytime rather than a 15 second time out even though the hospital trip takes longer for the simple fact I am actually playing the game.

Gear degradation due to defeat feels more like a gear based system...where your character is vastly changed by what is worn. The enhancements of CoH were more like assigning stats to a particular power not getting equipped. The fact that you had pretty much complete control in the system meant that it was almost always a specific choice to outfitting not a situation of this shirt I found boosts these stats more than that shirt. A gear based system is more (not completely) a situation of luck in finding gear and boosts....CoH you choose what you boosts you want to apply. In other words I decided how I want to equip myself don't mess with it.

Let's take the Pay Currency idea and the Hospital Timer idea and put them together.

The instant that you're defeated, you have to pay the full cost in Currency.
If you wait out the timer on the Hospital Countdown, the service is "free" because you've already paid in "time wasted" rather than in "currency wasted" for improved service.

Players at the Level Cap have the currency/timer costs of a Hospital trip increased (I like simply "doubled").

Net effects:
If you can pay, there's no wait time.
If you can't pay, you have to wait.

And as the countdown timer ticks away, the currency cost of a Hospital trip decreases linearly, so you get a rolling number representing the currency cost for the service from moment to moment. Players get to pick for themselves which is less painful for them to lose ... currency resources or time resources. That way you don't have a One Size Fits All solution, but rather a sliding scale to accommodate differing circumstances and wealth levels.

Note that any currency paid for this service would be removed from the in-game economy, which would help fight ... but not on its own solve ... the threat of hyperinflation of in-game currency.

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Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.